Folly of philosophy

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Anyone interested in philosophy should remember how philosophy originated. In ancient greece some of you will say.

But no , philosophy started more or less with farmers before greek civilization.

farmers are well aware that if you plant cabbage you do not get carrots.
They were the first to realize and understand the nature of things. Simple people with a vast knowledge.

To be sure , I am not implying we all hold council with farmers to gain understanding. Or that all who farm know the meaning to life.

But Why on earth do people think that you need a university degree, or you have to know all about academic style philosophy, and big words in order to know what the meaning to life is? How strange.

Of course, reading about socrates and aristotle, or any other prominent philosopher should not do any harm. But in many instances it does.

As I say if you plant cabbage you will not get carrots. Therfore if you busy yourself with intellectual thoughts and premises, conclusions etc, then this is all you will get.

A dried up mind , void of all the benifits that come of a mind that cherishes and loves and simply exists . A mind that continually has to analyze. And the repercussions of this?

Notice that it is usually men who love philosophy. They love to shout about all these complicated ideas and spend their time ridiculing things that make them feel slightly threatened.

Whereas women have more empathy, they feel things. Honestly, when will men finally begin learning from women?

I fear that many wont , and one of the the repercussions in their personal lives will normally be that they will not hold onto a woman very long. She will tire of his constant analyzing and inability to flow in the moment.

She might not be able to explain it, but she will feel something missing from the relationship and leave him. Unless of course he is a blessed philosopher who knows how to combine wisdom with practicality and treat her right.

But men like this are rare. At the moment at least. However it is my wish that the earth will be full of them one day. Balanced people , in general agreement. Able to combine divine philosophy with being kind hearted, generous, forgiving, charitable.

But what of the things we see around us at the moment? People who usually hold grudges for no good reason. People being two faced, childish, bitter, mechanical, frozen, ignorant , out for themselves , and to bring down the good. And all of them would say"who me?" . certainly not they think.

It is me who is wrong and they who are perfect i suspect they think. Women have a greater tendancy to go with feelings. Something men must learn to do. They cannot continue forever needing solid proof of something before they will act.

They must let go of this tiresome need to analyze. Even science is telling us now that it is true. Men are fundamentally different in that they love facts. Women can love facts also, but it is their ability to yield comprimise and empathize that gives them the edge over men at the moment.

Men cannot continue forever being weaklings either. Too stupid to see what is going on , and being easily led by women into doing things which are not right. For there are also many women that require inner work and are no angels.

Real philosophy is the combination of empathy, the world of feelings, and wisdom, practicality, the region and sphere of thoughts. The intellect, the head and brain must be working with the heart in order for it to be of any use.

Once and for all people should abandon this notion that academic study will help to liberate them. No!!

They will liberate themselves with the power of their hearts and minds, live a chivalric and noble life , Then academic study will enhance whatever they do.

The society of the future cannot contain bumpkins,aggressive types intent on spoiling things. We cannot settle for it .We must all ensure our world becomes a better place starting now. And abandon any selfish ideas we have about mankind and his destiny.

We have free will precisely because we ourselves must make some of the descisions. It is up to us to discover exactly what real philosophy entails.

God cannot be there to hold our hands. For this there are humans, and occasionally angels. Some humans even being angels themselves. Some not even aware of who they are.

Like the prince and the pauper is mankind, never realizing he is actually the prince, and heir to the throne. One day humanity should be exalted. But ask yourselves, does the philosophy of the past have the power to do that?

2

Iron Dog,

I’m sure that you have some valid ideas and even exhibit some understanding of Xin, but your post is much like the garden hose spraying all over the place. Perhaps you might take a particular idea or concept and make a statement which could elicit comment?

JT

3

One repercussion is that verbs become our friends. :slight_smile:

Iron Dog,
If academics is the ONLY thing that a person has in his/her life, then it would perhaps seem “dry” and maybe even “void.” But I don’t think anyone here lives in the perma-ivory-tower (ok… bit of a guess on my part). Clearly the mind is not the only valuable aspect of human experience. But for many, developing one’s mind is another way of valuing life. To struggle with philosophical questions is another attempt to engage the world, with everything a human being can. I speak very personally here. To me, engaging and living in the questions is a spiritual existance.

4

Noos, it is how you live that matters. Good Philosophical ideas must become concrete.

Engage if you must in intellectualism. But if your life is not poetic and harmonious, your philosophy does not serve you well.

5

Tentative,
dont patronize me. I may understand , my post is like a garden hose. Listen to yourself. Your argument and way of thinking is the very thing I am discussing in my letter to you.

6

Iron Dog,

First and foremost. I do not, and did not patronize you. You may have some valid ideas, some that I share, but your approach and tone and sweeping generalizations preclude any way of responding. Read what I said.

Your original post only invites agreement or disagreement. You leave no room for discussion. But perhaps this is because you aren’t here as a seeker, but to ‘enlighten’ all of us.

Do you have anything you wish to discuss, or are you here to tell us how it is?

JT

7

Dont try and turn it around. I know when someone is being smart.

8

I.D.,

“But no , philosophy started more or less with farmers before greek civilization.”

Why not with fishermen? Why not with shepards? Why not with warriors? Why not with merchants?

Dunamis

9

It says more or less farmers because fishermen dont grow anything , niether do shepards. The point im making is that karma is a law.

Plant one thing and thats what you get. Since farmers planted their whole life, thats why I said" started more or less" with farmers.

10

I.D.

“The point im making is that karma is a law.”

This is rather philosophical (i.e. conceptual) of you. Karma simply means consequence. A farmer plants a seed, a carrot grows, the law of seeds is born, conceptually. A fisherman weaves a net of a particular kind, and fish are caught, the law of nets is born. A warrior performs in a particular formation, the law of warrior formation is born. The reading of the harmonies of connection is what the philosophical is about, nothing more.

Dunamis

11

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

-Henry David Thoreau

12

obviously another academic that finds simple things hard.

13

obviously another academic that finds simple things hard

Iron Dog, Try some WD-40. It is you who it seems can’t understand that academic things are simple.

Dunamis

14

Talk about karma and consequences, this is the natural result of finding it hard when you wake up in the morning. :wink:

15

Dunamis

I see why you could think it is conceptual of me to just say" karma is a law".

But When I said you were an academic who is stifled, I meant that you are being difficult for no good reason. And I am only answering you because I think it is worth it. So I have nothing against you.

But I say farmers are amongst the first philosophers. You say you sort of agree, but you come back with" well why not fishermen, why not shepards.

If you understood what I was trying to say Why try to put an intellectual spanner in the works? Why not straight away come back with
“ok I agree,but what do you mean by this, that karma is a law, that farmers are philosophers”.

The example you give of “fishermen make nets , nets catch fish, and therfore the law of catching fish is born” is irrelevant. I say stifled academic because dont you see that you first of all analyze the words rather than trying to understand the concept.

How can we expect to make progress if we will not act until we are convinced something is real?

I dont have time to analyze in this way. It is dull. I only comment on what I have seen from the book of nature.

Nature teaches me all I know. This is why I dont need books written by people any more really, they are usually dull in comparison to what I can learn by observing how things are in the natural world around me.

I was only trying to convey that. To be sure, you make some good points, and I am not here to say I know it all. I welcome people like yourself questioning things . Who wants to just sail along in agreement?

Just that I would prefer if you looked at the concept, tried to feel if it was true . To feel its truth. Rather than analyzing it to its destruction.

Yes if warriors band together and make a warrior formation for the first time, then the warrior formation is born. But when I say karma is a law, I mean that it is this law that came before all that. It is this law that governs human affairs. The examples you gave do not do that.

16

Iron Dog,

While this comment was directed to Dunamis, I’d like to ask if you would explain “To feel its truth.” The statement seems to suggest that there is a truth ‘out there’ to be felt. How would one ‘know’ the truth by feeling alone? I can accept that there is such a thing as over-analyzing or even under-analyzing which can lead to missed understanding, but if truth is feeling, then of what use are words and concepts?

JT

17

Nature teaches me all I know.

Why are you wasting your time posted again and again on a computer and internet that was produced by thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have contemplated the world in a conceptual, unwise, complicated way, by minds that are …

“dried up…void of all the benifits that come of a mind that cherishes and loves and simply exists. [minds] that continually has to analyze”?

Why not hang out with the druids and learn magic, whispering to the moss this and that? Are you not a hypocritic each time you start a new “topic”? Where do you think technology came from, and why are you compulsively using it?

Dunamis

18

Iron Dog,

You can explain the evolution of the human intellect without the references to any one specific culture, civilization, or race. Philosophy is nothing more than a neurological process, only recently becoming a language based form of communicating. Which is to say that human beings were thinking philosophically before they were relating directly to another human being. The ‘original’ philosophy was a simple and primitive conceptual process being generated by a simple and primitive nervous system. ‘Thinking’ is the activity of receiving and processing information via the senses. The process is binary and neurological. It can be said that any organism exhibits some degree of ‘intellect,’ thinking’ and ‘sensing.’

That is on the money pretty much. However that step into agriculture marked the invention of the society, not politics. Man as a hunter-gatherer was as much a philosopher as the farmer. Remember, the activity of philosophy is not the historical objectivity of it; one cannot point at any given doctrine and say ‘that’s philosophy’ while this over here is not. We can say that man’s political and moral customs changed drastically when entering into a civilized state in a society, but that doesn’t mean it was any more philosophical than his previous state.

Your point, and a good one, one I share, is that this drastic change itself contained its strength through being refined in language and science. What ‘settling down’ did to the species was allow it to plot cycles, compose tests in similiar, predictable conditions, and most importantly record the information in writing and symbolism. These three elements coincidentally resulted in the philosophical doctrine and/or method, a study. Mathematics and Logic was developed.

The importance in the society is the fact that it marks the beginning of a historical philosophy, a dialect created between man and environment and archived as science. Only now can one plot the movement of the spirit of philosophy by identifying the cycles…farmer becomes historian and the soil becomes the words.

Still, you must always remember that a philosophical activity requires only an operating nervous system. An amoeba is a philosopher. An amoeba with a field of carrots is a philosopher with a catalog of statistics, notes, predictions, environmental conditions, mathematical formulas, Aristotlian logic, and recipies for carrot cake.

19

sigh What to do? Philosophy: its become like women for many. You can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

Aint that the truth. The head is never comfortable. What a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.

20

Iron Dog

Still stranger that most of these academics know about life, but not of life.

But being a philosopher, if such a pretentious label could ever be used seriously, isn’t about knowing the correct terms or the history of philosophy, being a philosopher, a thinker, is constructing understanding in the turmoil of reality and attempting to make sense of the insensible.

Really?
How so?

I think the only thing you can state with any degree of certainty is that reading these fellows, as far as you have or have understood what you have read, has done YOU – according to your own evaluations – more harm than good.
It has confused you or placed doubt and increased anxiety in your soul.

So now you rally against it, you defend your past bliss and you question.
Good for you.

I can only speak for myself and say that the benefits I’ve gotten from Philosophy and from thinking, in general, pale in comparison to any blind doing.

It has allowed me to appreciate and to become more efficient.

So a not “dried up mind” a hydrated and voluptuous mind, for you, is an animal mind, that simply exists without asking why and simply acts without wondering how it should or if it should.

How wonderfully absurd.

Actually they know they are being threatened, while the unthinking mind is oblivious to all dangers.

I can appreciate the benefits of intuitive understanding, in relation to intellectual understanding, but I would not go to such extremes as to dismiss either way.

A more balanced method, perhaps, is more preferable.
A Dionysian/Apollonian mix.

Ah, and here we come to the real crux of the issue, for our dear friend.
Sex, surmounts any other motive or goal.

“What’s the benefit of thinking…” he asks “…when it wont get you laid?”
and here we see, on display, modern western man and the filtering effects –I’ve mentioned in another thread – of women in society.

If you, man, want access to procreation, if you desire intimate physical intercourse and a release from your instinctive needs, then you must adhere to this norm, this type; in this case, the unquestioning, unthinking, unresisting, type.

To put it another way, if you want sex, you must become more feminine, as in ‘The Feminization of Man’, and you must possess the appropriate characteristics that are deemed desirable for procreation, under the current circumstances.
If not?
No sex and no biological fulfilment.

Ah yes. It took some time but the underlying motives came shining through.

The levelling of man, the creation of a greater whole, within which its participants become dispensable copies of one another; a super-organism to replace the human being.

Here the words of conformity are uttered with poetic predictability: kind-hearted, charitable, generous, forgiving….He/she forgot compassionate, loving, equal, similar etc.

Catch-phrases denoting harmonization, management, domestication, stability, but hiding personal concerns about self-importance, desirability, worthiness, talent, possibility, and survival.
“We should love each other, indiscriminately!” we scream, and we mean: “You must love me, indiscriminately and without reason, without thought, with simple complacency.”

What we have here is the making of an ant-farm.

A very selective, and incomplete description, to be sure.
Here ‘ignorance’ is recast as the producer of ‘evil’, as opposed to the more cogent ‘good’.
This after he/she urged us to not think anymore, to just be and feel, just like women do.

Here the selectivity and arbitrariness of the thinking shows through.
We must not think but not be ignorant, simultaneously.
Gnosis, gained through feminine osmosis and action; an intuitive, Dionysian wisdom of the ages.
Selfishness is here presented as the source of all ‘evil’, the Christian blight, the Satanic sperm and yet, the selfishness behind the ‘altruism’ is ignored because it isn’t felt, it requires thought and thought is, itself, ‘evil’.
A nice piece of self-contained reasoning.

The prejudice here is that all feeling is positive, from a Judeo-Christian perspective.

The idea that one can feel an urge to kill or to torture or to cause harm, is alien to the feminine mind, according to this intellectual giant of ‘feel-good’ ideology.
Women are, inherently ‘good’, because they rationalize so rarely.

A Bear simply feels, as well, yet it can tear your head off and not feel the slightest remorse. It acts with little thought, besides the mechanical and practical.

“Evil’ is formularized here.
Its negative characteristics cast forth like curses.

Women have always had the edge.
It had to be taken away from them.

Men are obsolete in a technological world with no open accessible frontiers.
Society prefers docile, unquestioning, unthinking automatons, who simply give into instinct.
This is why the feminine, in all of us – men and women – is idealized and promoted.

Truly, the female’s ability to “yield” is what makes her the most desirable to any system.

He/she means, just the way he is not being “stupid” and being “forced to do things which are nor right”.

Here strength is recast as the ability to yield and to be smart is to not think.
A total Orwellian redefinition, all meant to excuse his capitulation to his desire to fuck and to those he needs accomplish this task.

Here we can see the process of indoctrination, from a biological perspective, in progress and we see how females play a part in this redefinition of ideals, as seductive sirens of desire.
They “yield” and if one wants to be with them, one must “yield” in accordance to modern sensitivities, as well.
Or else the genetic pool holds no place for you.
The process of evolution, coupled with memetic force, in all its glory.

Here, our resident genius alludes to a truism.
Philosophy is a combination of artistry and intellect.
But he limits this empathy to what he considers positive and desirable and productive.
He has no appreciation for the destructive and the negative and the burning sensation of discomfort and despair and the creativity of dissatisfaction.

Yes, let us all be ignorantly blissful.
Let us act with no thought… and see what happens.
Let us become Dionysian, more animalistic.
I concur.

This is where the level of stupidity reaches a level where I begin questioning if he’s actually serious or baiting.

He, obviously, has felt his way into this bit of sophistry.

He decided to turn on his computer and spew his inanities therefore he has free-will.
Excellent.

Okay, now things are becoming exceedingly absurd.

Huh?

This can only be some kind of ruse.
Nobody can be that dim.

How very, feminine, of him.