a lot of the posts that i’ve read on here, and those read to me in other contexts, sound like people not sure of their own beliefs, and not prepared to think about them…there is an avoidance of responsibility regarding people’s own thought processes, deferring belief formulation onto other more “qualified” sources/producers…don’t believe everything you read, everybody has an agenda, even me, but think about what you come across, never just accept it…it’s all disinformation because there is no truth, never has been, only interpretation upon re-interpretation, packaged by those in authority as good/evil, truth/falsehood…our evolution towards more complex social organisation is not a smooth idyllic process it is plagued with “errors”, that result in drastic swings one way and then the next…become self-conscious to the processes around you, rather than just reading the story as it pops up on your screen start writing…when the story becomes self-conscious of what it is, of how it is written, and most-importantly of the techniques of plot, etc, what does it them become? man is a story, try to do a bit better in the sequel…
as if to confirm what i was feeling earlier on, a selection from the book i’m reading:
“Our usual sense of who we are…is purely a function of our sense of how we differ from others”
“…if Dasein typically loses itself in the ‘they’, it will understand both its world and itself in the terms that ‘they’ make available to it, and so will interpret its own nature in terms of the categories that lie closest to hand in popular culture and everyday life; and they will be as inauthentic as their creators.”
that’s just a brief section from Mulhall’s guide to heidegger’s being and time, a brilliant introduction…
…but anyway, these are ideas that have been floating around since 1927 and they are only now really permeting the mediascape in a conscious way, if at all…this is what i mean of be self-conscious…understand the way that you relate to things in your life…Thales said ‘know thyself’, there was a reason i choose this name…but, know that it is all beyond good and evil, which upsets me in some ways but is the only authentic way, in that there is no value difference between understanding your life and not, but that the only people you ever want in a revolution are those that want to be there…otherwise it’s just the hippy’s all over again…a handfull actually understanding what they are attempting and the rest just along for the ride…
…Howard Bloom’s ideas relate to a lot of what Mulhall explicate in that section of his guidebook, i’d encourage anybody who has read the mulhall or thinks they are going to to check out Bloom…
is this a band-wagon? i think i’ll jump!
as with hvd, itis refreshing to hear what i consider to be the sovereign truth of humanity. ‘know thyself’ is the essence of individualism, and hence the only source of genuine real perfection in a person.
my answer to hvd’s question would be a resounding yet cautious ‘no’. a truth is only a truth, in my eyes, when it considers time, and the fluidity of ideas and what ‘the conditioner’ sees as the status-quo. hegel’s dialectic merely simplifies this most important idea. as for the need to create your own system of good/evil, i could not agree with you any more than i do. this is central to individualism and is an entirely necessary prerequesite to somebody’s realisation of their own personality and their own perfection. many people find their perfection, but through dominance over other people. simply because they see themselves as perfectly ‘fit’ for the world they live in, ignoring the fact that the world is never still. so whilst they wallow in their own illusion, somebody else who is willing to always change/question/think/be will find themselves blocked by the fact that their only route to perfection is also through dominance over others. what a mess!
the above attitude is exactly what is needed, from everyone, from the moment they’re born. ambitious/impossible? - not if the me-and-the-rest notion of good and evil is replaced by the me-and-the-rest-for-me idea of perfection and imperfection. see ‘perfect world’/ posts by pangloss
thales. you are right. so there.
ps-thanx for the reply to my ucl int. 'll get back.
I am agreeing with what is being said. Central I think to the whole idea is the importance of subjectivity and of individuality. I believe that what has been said implies that there can be no universal truth. Individuality is key and this rests on knowing yourself…great.
But I have 2 questions: Leo: Can your term ‘perfection’ be defined since it is key to your thesis and I need a bit of clarification to fully understand it all. I’m sure you have written it somewhere but I can’t remember exactly where, so could you just post it again here please.
Thales: If you believe in the absence of a universal truth, which is something that I suggested in my post on elightenment, then could you post a response to your enlightenment post. Do you agree with me when I said that only an individual can reach his own enlightenment and this differs from everyone else’s. An enlightened society is therefore one in which everyone has reached his own individual enlightenment.
alex: i am not sure that there is such a difference between the individual and society…the ‘world’ works upon universal truths, which do seem to be analytic-or-rather-obviously-simple once expounded, (not happy with connotations of analytic, but been drinking watching man u drop out of european cup) like that of evolution…evolution grabs hold of a material-soon-to-be-biological replicator and eventually organises it into a system capable of intelligence, and self-consciousness…apply the same universal law to a replicator within any type of medium, eg. with memes within human culture, then you can conceivably get a similar form of evolution leading to ‘societal’ information structures which are ‘self-conscious’…of course just as i, or even a single cell within your body, cannot see the self-conscousness within you we could not conceive or see that within a soceity…
…specifically, i think the principal is that the fundamentals of existence are universal, operating at every level of the stratosphere…this shapes the progress of things, we, as human/Dasein, are only presented with one facet of this…perhaps these processes or fundamentals are god, i don’t know but if i ever attain enlightenment i promise to let you know it is possible before i go party on a higher plain…
this all reminds me of a bill hicks joke…
newsreader: "today a young man on acid realised that all matter is just energy condenced to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing ourselves subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is but a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves…here’s Tom with the w(h)eather…
and another one by the great man:
“you see i think drugs have done so good things for us, i really do, and if you don’t think drugs have done good things for us do me a favour; go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn them, because you know what, the musicians who’ve made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years… rrrrrrrrrrrreeeeaaaaalllll fucking high on drugs…”
A wise mans knows what he says and a fool says what he knows
V (Male)
For free access to my earlier posts on voluntary simplicity, compulsive spending, debting, compulsive overeating and clutter write: vfr44@aol.com. Any opinion expressed here is that of my own and is not the opinion, recommendation or belief of any group or organization.