I suppose you could have a Church fanatically devoted to philosophizing itself, rather than a particular philosopher. Where all people do is eat, sleep, shit and philosophize, in the hopes of one of them, or the Church collaboratively, will discover the perfect philosophy - objective, rational and universal.
Sort of like a philosophical monastery.
I talk about self perfecting in a different thread and they say how imperfections make us human and perfection is basically bad.
So if you want to find a perfect philosophy, you’ll have to face the fact that allot of people either don’t understand or dislike it.
Not necessarily Dan.
What a given demographic of humanity has difficulty digesting is an actuality of perfection, probably because such geometry is experientially uncanny to our senses, but the ideal of perfection is incredibly revered in humanity; while at the same time, the complete inability to achieve perfection matched to the ideal is endeared as well as disliked.
If humans actually met a truly perfect deity, many would think it looks grotesquely attractive, many would be afraid of it and many others would be disgusted with it.
Yet; in each of these types of relationships, our species would still be found to continue to strive for the ideal.
I’m not seeing it, Jayson.
People can’t revere something truly until they know what it is. They can’t copy it unless they understand it.
People don’t want perfection, and also they don’t even know what it is or what it is supposed to be.
All the corruption battles to make the world into a place where corruption thrives.
People want a large mob of decadent peaceful half-asleep nonsense.
If people naturally strived for greatness, the world would be much different.
Human nature is pretty much static. There have always been politicians, since history began.
Humans are mostly parasitic apes. The work towards the opposite of a eutopia.
But maybe philosophy can’t get us there. So a church of philosophy would be no different than what we have … delivering perhaps only more sophisticated mind games.
And doesn’t this notion of a “perfect philosophy” which is “objective, rational, and universal” read like any other religion we have experienced before? And couldn’t that make it as susceptible to dogma?
To the cookie monster, cookies are objective, universal, reasonable, perfect things.
Now, the world would be a better place if we all became cookie monsters, even though it would make the world of the cookies in and of themselves worse, because they would get eaten more often. It’s a trade off.
Every religion is essentially an idealized carrot that never has an end to the pursuit of the perceived perfect form.
I agree that most won’t like perfection when seeing it, because it is uncanny and alien to our species.
Yet, we still hold icons in all mediums up and chase after it as if we can accomplish that perfection.
“Best” is a very common myth of perfection chasing.
Most likely.
In this context, it’s just another flavor.
I don’t consider myself a contrarian. I think that some religion is an idealized never ending carrot. My own ‘religion’, however, has a certain point where it is accomplished. I think almost anything can become completed. Sometimes it takes years. On earth there is a constant cycle. But it is just repeats mostly of the same old things. Also I think there is a real Best and a false Best. But thanks for being patient with me.
Quite, and this is why you find yourself observantly at odds with a given demographic of society.
Your vantage is a pretty interesting method of approach and should be explored more openly within society, but for some reason it hasn’t really caught on.
Most just position an ideal of whatever is admired and then, in varying degrees of steadfastness, employ that ideal as some conceptual gravitational pull used to psychologically keep them within some range of behavioral orbit.
Yeah, I would think the use of the term “universal” would raise a few red flags.
At the same time, you have to be empathetic with those focus on such conventions in that they see them as a solid defense against previously experienced forms of dogma and authoritarian enterprises.Unfortunately, this could prove to be little more than a form of Bad Faith in that no one system would likely protect against those who lust after power. Such people will generally exploit whatever ideology happens to be at hand including, as we have already pointed out, philosophical ones. All indications are that we will just have to play it by ear using all the tools we have available to us, even things like objectivity, rationality, and maybe even the universal -but that would only be among the thousand others we have available to us and those yet to be created.
Ultimately, I don’t think it a matter of the tools being used or the religious status of a project as much as the intent of the individual. Ideologies do nothing; they don’t kill, exploit, or oppress; people do.
I was exaggerating when I said perfect, of course there’s such thing as perfection I think, but maybe if philosophers were more preoccupied with solutions contra problems… fanatically so, we’d’ve found some better ones by now.
Sometimes we need a little dogma, it gets people moving in the direction you want them to go in, as opposed to just blowing around in the wind, aimlessly. The herd is being manipulated anyway like so much fodder, it’s not so much a question of if, but who’s doing the manipulating and for what purpose. Better philosophers pulling the strings than plutocrats.
I don’t know eyes. What you describe doesn’t sound like philosophy. Do philosophers want dogma, and want people to be the types that need to be made to go where you want them to go? Sounds like you are describing Hindu sadhu baba’s, that require total devotion to a master.
True, philosophers pulling the strings would be better than plutocrats pulling the strings. But wouldn’t we be better off if the masses didn’t need to be controlled? Wouldn’t that be what philosophers would seek for the masses? That they’d be properly guided from within, not from without, by plutocrats or otherwise?
Are you saying we just have to face it, that the masses need to be controlled?
Wouldn’t that become a police state … like we’re seeing here in America? where the government, or rather, actually, the rich, fear the people … and want military equipped police to control them? Would philosophers use military style police to control the masses?
Would the church of philosophy be politically active against military and police equipped like military?
We should note a possible connection between the fact (may the body of Strunk rest in his grave) that it was Eye’s I was quoting when I brought in the terms “objectivity, reason, and the universal” and the authoritarian implications of his latter point. He’s basically giving this to me by confirming my point.
Philosophy can be dogmatic; that was a very popular form for philosophy to take in the early Greek culture.
It seems odd to us today to think of it this way because, culturally, it is often held as some counter culture to religious dogma, but that’s our culture’s use and not an inherent property of philosophy.
A dogma really just outlines a belief, and philosophy has plenty of opportunity for people to hold as belief in regards to the rightness and truth of the given philosophy or philosophies.
In our culture, we just don’t really see this because religion soaks most of this role of instructional dogmatism (which wasn’t the case in early Greek culture; temples didn’t have self-help instructional “sermons”), and we more use philosophy today as a tool more closely related to critical thinking.
Very few people live their life by a developed philosophy in our culture, but that hasn’t always been the case in philosophy’s history.
And V;
To an extent, yes.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t need inspirational leading figures in humanity.
I don’t think this speaks lowly of humanity, but yes, humanity does work on effective group compelling and thinking.
Due to our social sizes, we don’t tend to see constructs which engage the entire population, but instead, just a demographic within it.
Yet, it does have its functional role in the social behavior in humans in that this is the means by which communities within a demographic become active and engaged as a mass collective rather than a strand of separate and independent identities.
Most people aren’t suckered into some collective for an idea, but instead look for an entry point to an idea which sparks and engages them, usually, after some provocation of opposition which causes them unrest in some manner.
Meaning; many people may not know what they are looking for in detail, but they know it in emotional satisfaction and they go looking for it.
Enough gathered together creates a movement, sect, political party, protest, etc…
So yes, dogma does “get people moving”.
It even does so on a more personal level, as many people choose to start their days with some fashioned form of psychological warm-ups; many are dogmatic.
But there are some deeper concerns for me. It just seems as if Eye’s approach completely neglects the creative aspect of philosophy for the sake of some questionable notion of it as some kind of fact/truth-finding mission –that which commits it to the role of being little more a form of armchair science. But philosophy can only be distinguished as that which (copping off of, and revising Russell) lays in that no man’s land between science and art. Philosophy, it seems to me, is primarily a mutant offspring and hybrid of the two.
And given the creative element of it, it seems to me that Eye’s view of it, that which focuses on objectivity, reason, and the universal, that is as a strict criteria, can only shut down the flows of energy that are crucial to our cultural progress. Using the popular term in a metaphorical sense, it seems to me that our cultural progress must be dependent on the momentum we can build through a communal “meme” exchange. And this aspect of it, that which focuses on the creative aspect of it, has practical implications. I would offer as evidence the 90’s: a period when a creative boom was accompanied by a scientific boom that was accompanied by technological boom that was accompanied by an economic boom. Now do not let the serial nature of language and the way I have described it mislead you: all the booms were acting in tandem and playing off of each other. Just because I put creativity first doesn’t mean it was the point of origin. I don’t think anyone could pinpoint what that was. The main point is that creativity, not just fact finding, played a major role in it. In other words, society seems to work best when it loosens up, not when it enslaves itself to such terms and criteria as objectivity, etc., etc…
And I would also point out that philosophy makes as much room for being beautiful as being accurate. And as Camus points out: all arguments for beauty are, ultimately, arguments for Freedom. And in some circles, there could be no goal more important to philosophy than Freedom. I mean without Freedom, who could possibly engage in any true type of intellectual enquiry?
The other problem lies in Eye’s cynicism about humanity. I mean if you interrogated them about it, my guess is that you would find that it is based on limited experiences with humanity that are generally based on what one sees on the news. And the problem with the news is that it is prone to simulacrum effects based on its imperative to not just to report the news, but to sell it as well. For instance, if a person goes to work every day and then goes home and smokes a joint, that’s not news. On the other hand, if a crack addict kills someone in the process of jacking their car to feed their habit, then that is news. Likewise, if an individual adopts Christianity as an anchor in their life, and doesn’t choose to engage in vulgar displays of their Christian charity (for the sake of a human interest story), the news doesn’t care. However, if one stands in front of a church holding up a sign that says “remember, God still hates fags!”, then that is news. The problem with this is that it creates a slanted view of humanity much like that of Eye’s.
Now Eyes might appeal to personal experience. But that could possibly be the result of their living in a bad neighborhood. But, ultimately, this cynical view is based on cherry picking the behaviors that support it. My view is that people are generally trustworthy to the extent that we need them to be in order to live with them. What you have to look out for is desperation.
The hypocrisy of it lies in pimping the notion of reason when I have to question whether Eyes has utilized the critical tools of questioning their own experience, that which led to the notion that humanity is somehow defective and in need of strong leadership. I have to wonder if they didn’t just adopt it for the fully subjective motivation of being radically cynical and chic.
I don’t see philosophy as uniquely one manner of engagement.
It is both what you are discussing, D63, as well as what Eyes is discussing.
The reason for the rational slant on philosophy in our culture, as an inherent expectation, is because our culture focuses on critical logic in philosophy very much.
However, any student of philosophy is well aware that philosophy and critical logic are two separate conceptual entities.
Critical logic outlines things in rational thinking and objectivity, but that is because it is a tool for working through critical thinking carefully.
Philosophy may employ that critical logic, but it is not defined by such.
I said in the beginning I’m interested in the practical methods of how to create a church, not philosophical reasons for why it can’t exist. You could say your points bring into question what the best brand name would be, and that is a practical discussion. I’m not sure what your motive was though.
It could easily be argued that a forum for debate does not lead to dogma. Congress for example is a mess of disagreement.
What I’m proposing isn’t a room where people get lectured to, though having respected speakers would be interesting. It is a room where people discuss things. It is democratizing church. People yell at each other. The eloquent win the day on whatever topic is being discussed. They leave hopefully on good terms, maybe under the pretense of “Boy were we drunk last night.”, or that there are no hard feelings in verbal fight club. Most importantly though, what we gain is access to discussing topics that are normally awkward or impolite. We inform ourselves on what the opposition is actually thinking.
We do risk further entrenching and polarizing preexisting dogmas. The internet does this pretty well. This behavior may have existed before the internet, but the internet definitely exaggerates it. A church of philosophical debate may do the same. Congress certainly goes through periods of alienating the opposition. So in that respect, maybe it will be dogmatic. Maybe a ritualistic goat sacrifice will get everyone back together on good terms despite their disagreements?