I only have enough time to reply to one of your replies.
I’ve developed the divide between Chreia and Paradox, personally. Chreia were usually one liners, comedic, aimed at proving a point, or series of points, on the observation of a Cynic on the paradoxes between Eudaimonia and and actual action. Aristotle and Bergson were of great importance to me in developing my technique in understanding the cognitive parameters in their theory of Comedy, as well as others such as Milarepa and Chuang Tzu.
I was a Cynic philosopher for a long time, but not too long ago changed to Stoicism. The Stoics continued this practice in developing early theater character types called Mimes, not really that similar to the modern concept… it all hinges on classical concepts of vices and virtues at play in human society and literature, and it always involves contradictions in syllogism, between what we think we are doing, and what we are actually doing.
I’ve further built up the system to engadge the throws of imagination with comedy. I wasn’t the first, in larger narratives, Volitare was the better, but what I do is I don’t approach sympathetic audiences seeking my work out, but rather engage hostile audiences, in the old Cynic practice of door to door knocking. The only audience I care for is the one throwing vitrole or knuckles down, unwilling to acknowledge others views. This forum, mostly Nietzscheans, but elsewhere, can be very different.
No, I don’t think you understand logic, I think our whole age is mistaken in it. How can I know this about you from so little exposure to you? I know it in the same sense of a minerologist knows the inside of a mountain from only a few surface pebbles. I’m long studied in this, and not just on forums.
In regards to hitting a dead end. Yes, I fully agree, the paranoid can be turned off, they have a very long memory as well. The paranoid schizophrenics I know remember for years who the “good cops” and “bad cops” are, and like a cat, never forget. But, this is making a monolith of kind of a category of people we don’t quite understand that much about. Thats the mystery with Phonetic Ethics… he is clearly schitzo, but I continuously test him like the dinosaur against the fence in Jurassic Park. I don’t accept everything is lost, I presume a great many feedback loops traditionally unexplored are still functioning but overlooked because others see he is disabled. When I see a response, I consider it in a much larger theory of mind consideration. He isn’t the only one I work with.
My state, West Virginia, has a very high High School Dropout rate. Its not because the population is intrinsically less evolved, just less opportunities to advance, in relation to temptations to flounder and drop out. Most academics are interested in high school retention… fine, but I can’t help but notice this leaves off a wide swath of the population left behind, unable to further their understandings enough to be fully useful to their society. This causes further loss if economic stimulation, more poverty, a nasty cycle. Its why I’ve become closely aligned with ideas from Montessori and Laubach Literacy. We have wide swaths of population here who can’t understand the concept behind Algerbra when taught in school, but the concept being taught isn’t designed for such a population… their patents and grandparents didn’t understand it, no apparent need to know it in daily life. Same with calculas, or basic logic, etc. Its at this very point in school when these subjects are being taught people loose track or attention in learning, turn to drugs, gangs, sex, etc… and drop out. Others have to keave due to needing a job. They never quite grasped the conceots needed.
As a result, a bug chunk if the population ignorantly stares, much like you do, asking “what does this have to do with me”. Well… it has to do with why your life and community is always so poor and shitty. It also has to do with the fact the educational system was then and now, completely incapable of tackling the phenomena that made you. As a result, there is a hugh cognitive rift between the haves and have nots, because they dont understand the language and signs used in intelligence, dispite displaying they know it, unknowingly.
Its why Ive taken a very diligent approach to looking at the history of education, especially mathematics, form antiquity around the world learning to apply foreign methods of teaching concepts where the modern western corpus is failing to make impact. I taught my four year old nephew how to add and substract, multiply and divide sums in the hundreds of thousands already, after just one attempt. Both his parents are heroine addicts. I have taught retarded children years behind in school how to read advanced works of literature. It comes from knowing how the brain works, personality restrictions, and a ability to link technology, such as a abacus variation with a logical idea, to teach a concept that further teaches other concepts on its own.
I can only do this, if I do exactly what your deploring against. Smashing my head against a impossible to penetrate wall. I am a philosopher, neither the first nor the last, and I am not intimidated by such obstacles. I seek to smash the ediface of ignorance, but will be content to merely chip away at it like my predecessors, and those who follow after me. It is a exciting challenge, to see in the dialectic your impulses are ALL FUCKING WRONG in explaining something to someone who doesnt get it. Where does the problem lay? Who really is the bigger fucking idiot? The guy who doesnt get it, or the guy who cant ever seem to satisfactory explain it right? The latter, if he isnt aware of his folly, and need to change his approach.
This change of appriach effects the foundation of intellectual philosophy. In one time of history, civilization made slaves of men incapable of understanding, but now we make men out of slaves with our teaching netgods and understandings. We’ve come a long way since the division of the Liberal and Mechanical Arts under men like Capella, but we still have much farther to go. If you cant make a impression rhetorically, then you cant teach… you cant convince, you cant better the lives of men or broaden the pursuit of knowledge. It is your mindset that stagnates, and your mindset that must be abolished.
Its why Ive undertaken writting Farmer Buridan. I’m modeling him after a 19th century, agrarian farmer, always in antagonism with his know everything wife, that he is trying constantly to outwit; she is convinced he is lazy, he is tired of her nagging and spying on his work, so he solves tasks via ingenious solutions… each solution underlines a method to be taught in school, underlining how trigonometry or algerbra, chemistry or economucs work. The children will be raught the concepts from a early age… I took the core from Buridan in medieval logic. Its chosen in its era for a simple reason, its a agrarian society, and the earth will soon be above 11-12 billion people in my lifetime. I need a basic folkhero like character who can be torn apart by any nation, renamed and adapted in parts as if he was their own, so uneducated patents can read these stories to their children, who will love the rascal lazy farmer always comming up with a solution, while not just preparing the child for higher education conceptually, but themselves democratically and economically once the grasp what is going on. Farmer Buridan will be copyright free, given teacher guides explaining how it relates to basic ideas in higher education. As long as you can read, if your a dirt farmer in Mali, you should grasp something of knowledge. Even if you can’t read, if you can hear the stories, you can ponder it.
I’m hoping works like this and copycat works radically increases the scope of education. Problem is, who will educate our educators, worst, our “philosophers”? People like you exist with the presumption of an absolute knowledge. You turn your nose at the friction and diversity in cognitive styles. A Logical Fallacy gets thrown up, like a medieval wall, full of archers, preventing progress whereas it would otherwise be naturally be possible if philosophers had a love for the dialectic.
So… with such people come a very different approach. The Pull My Finger approach, being both painfully crude and enlightened at the same time. An idea isn’t much different than a finger… you can ask Cratylus, but you use the wrong finger in a academic setting, it shows your wrong. Diogenes point was things existed independently of our civil preconceptions, and in and of itself is most innocent. You shouldn’t be offended, give up hope too quickly, or turn away from a difficult situation, even when the other party is intentionally toying with you (especially). What you need is the awareness that like Milarepa and Diogenes, a innocent appendage isn’t much different from a profane one. You need to take rhetoric and dialectics as original each and every time, and no form of philosophy is a better teacher, more memorable and lasting, than humorous teaching. It is a Koan, Paradox, Logic, all wrapped up into one narrative. Bursting out laughing isn’t much different from Archimedes yelling Ah Ha, or Eureka!
Everything I do, I try to be experimental yet plottingly conservative, pointing back to the history encompassing my predecessors. I try to be off the cuff and original, yet looking for the principles and cognitive relations for future thinkers to build on. Essentially, I try always to be a philosopher.
So logical proofs are useful, but they rarely are expressed in the best manner, nir take the full scope of human experience of the idea behind the proof under consideration. A failure to teach properly, pass on a idea, signals more our own ignorance than the ignorance of others.
