I am learning and comprehending things exponentially faster.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Thanks to ILP, reasons that I shall not explain, and reasons that I have yet to uncover, I am learning and comprehending things exponentially faster than I ever have before. Perhaps it’s just the stage of my life–I’m turning 25 next week and my brain is maturing. I can actually feel it; all of my life’s doubts and uncertainties are taking shape by themselves after years of subjective experiences and relations…

I used to not understand my past, what I really wanted in life, or where my future was going.

Now, I understand my past, I know what I want, and I know where I’m going. Everything is clear.

I believe that this is part to a personal enlightenment of mine, combined with my physical maturation. I believe that nihilism has brought to me everything that I owe to life. Any meaning that I can possibly believe in is owed to its annihilation beforehand–and it gives me power, understanding, and inductive meaning (that is ultimately arbitrary).

I know what philosophy is now, to me and to others. It is poetry. It is the manipulation of language to create or destroy reality as we see fit.

I know what I am now. I am a poet.

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This is not altogether different from a perspectivist’s view. A perspectivist will use nihilism as but a tool - a destructive force, and would use myth, and not poetry per se, as the creative force - also as a tool. But if not poetry, then metaphor - the difference may not be very much at all. In fact, the difference may be semantic.

But surely philosophy is a manipulation of language in a way, at least. It is an analyisis of language.

Again, the difference may be semantic.

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i preferr to view language as having certain constraints on philosophy, but not necessarily having a grasp

(note the metaphor used: was it clear enough or suitably encompassing?)

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with the mind set of a lawyer , manipulation . but not in the true spirit of what philosophy is really all about , truth

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To me, there is no reality outside of language. Language IS reality. We cannot think outside of our language. And though I do not call myself a nihilist, I agree with realoriginal.

We cannot think beyond language. When we need new reality, we must create new language.

Yes. If I have witnessed anything in this life it is the sheer power that language has. Language can make people believe or do anything. But, with great power comes great responsibility. What kind of reality do you want to shape in your small circle, in your community, in the world?

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one with no regrets

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but how does a sophists do this ? how does a sophists , or a manipulator of language , have no regrets ?

its not the nature of the sophists to have regrets since he knows exactly what he is doing , that is being a manipulator of language to his own benefit . for the sophists there is no right or wrong , he doesn’t care . he just wants to win the argument , bottom line . and truth has nothing to do with it.

this " one with no regrets " is a load of non-sense

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by simply practicing what you preach of coarse. this is not a new idea.

if a man manipulates language in ways he knows are trivial, then that man must preach nihilism and justify why he does so.

for someone who has more faith in language however, it is much easier.

in this sense delusions can be very cumbersome and hindering. whatever they may be.

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i’m a poet to.
The boy stood on the burning deck
His pocket full of crackers
The flame had lit the burning wick
And blew off both his knackers.

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If this is true, then whizzim nicht lokakakatumpt obolwhoppen.

Understand? Of course you don’t, because language does not create reality.

In order for language to be meaningful, it must be capable of corresponding and representing objective things in the world. These things exists before and beyond their “names”. The only way dwappstinz can mean anything is if it is used as a designator for an already existing thing.

If Heidegger were here I’d tell him the same thing and then ask him how much he was being paid to write such nonsense. Then I would rob him.

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Haha well he was quite big. I’d wish you luck. Yes, perhaps you think that Heidegger was just trying to be interesting to become famous. His books are very interesting. He was very selfish and ambitious and he stole his own mentor Husserl’s position as University Chair. But, truth, beauty, and the interesting are not necessarily separate for Heidegger. I know this is hard for you to understand, since you have been raised your whole life with an X-Files “The Truth is Out There” theory of truth. Really what Heidegger has done with truth is include “the possible” as well as “the actual” into a theory of truth.

Truth is something that is constantly being uncovered, since the possible is always being uncovered. This means an object’s properties as well as all its functions and possible functions. As human beings we tend to build things and categorize objects through their function. For example, a garbage can is made to hold trash. I don’t think about the object out of this context. A urinal is used to pee in. A baseball bat is used to play baseball. Until we begin to improvise, and perhaps use the bat as a weapon. Through the hermeutic examination of objects, we find new functions for objects and new truth.

Well don’t leave me high and dry, tell me what this new langauge means.

Not all language corresponds to things in the world. Many things are simply ideas, phantoms of the imagination. I always think of the spirit of the inventor. People once said man cannot fly. Leonardo da Vinci conceived of a flying machine. Eventually the Wright brothers built it. His creative idea became manifest in the world. Or take for example, the concept of world peace. There has never been world peace, nor might there ever be. It is an idea. A goblin. Language must be included in a system, but this system is always expanding.

If you don’t believe language as simply man-made systems, think about Baseball. Think about the language of baseball. We call certain actions in the game balls and strikes. These ideas mean absolutely nothing outside the context of the game of baseball.

The possible ranks higher than the actual. Since time is undecided, we as human beings can shape the world as we see fit. Your belief that there is simply one reality that we are learning rather than shaping is a recycled onto-theological belief left over from when epistemologists used to believe in god.

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I think language does correspond to things seen in the world. It may take those things and extend them to things that don’t exist but its base is always of something that’s from the real world. How else can you impart an idea to others if it only exists in your mind? You have to show some concrete example and elaborate from it.

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Then ideas are not of the world? I believe the most rational approach to this is reductionism, as a materialist. Do you consider yourself a dualist, if “ideas” are not “in” or “part of” the world? And from where do ideas come?

Really this “creative idea” is simply a composition of trivial ideas made from knowledge of ordinary, already existing things. For example, the inventor of a plane observes an insect or bird and from the observation that this animal is a body with wings, he imagines duplicating the animal by building a machine with the wings.

With this in mind, these “steps” in which complex ideas are created are not, themselves, extraordinary. This would hold true for any invention. The idea doesn’t just come from nowhere.

A very simple idea…again, this is no extraordinary phenomena…it is simply the idea that a world without crime and/or violent conflict is possible. It certainly is. Nothing far fetched about that.

I do believe language is a man made system. The evolution of language use by animals is again nothing extraordinary. Communication can be made with sounds, and coordinating efforts with other animals through the use of this language is advantageous to survival. Even the simplest sounds, like a beaver smacking his tail on the water, serves an evolutionary function for the species.

I didn’t know “time was undecided”. Who decides time? Hell, what does that even mean- to “decide time”.

Well that is really an improper use of reality in that statement. There cannot be a quantity of realities, unless the number is referring to a quantity of things that are real, in the statement. But in this case, you wouldn’t be using the term “reality” to mean “everything”, like you are now. Instead you would use the term in reference to a thing which was real.

I think you should substitute “substance” for “reality” in that statement. And yes, there is only one substance.

I object to these charges!

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Manic,

Nonsense words do mean something. They mean ‘nonsense’ until a human gives them meaning.

That meaning is created by humans. It used to represent sensed experiences, not ‘external objects’ that somehow exist outside of experience. Reality is based on inter-dependency. The classical subjective-objective dichotomy is false and should be rejected.

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What is experienced is the cause of the sensory perception involved in the experience. The external world most certainly exists, and without out it, there could be no negation. Negation is necessary for self awareness…as Sartre put it (in a non-cartesian way) the fundamental relationship to the world is through making a distinction between the “I” and the “that”. This is a negation of being, first and foremost, as the axiom that an “I” is not what it is aware of. It is called negative because it is not a Being itself, but the complete lack of being. The Cartesian second substance of mind is not a distinct ontological category itself, because it is expressed in the world as an epiphenomenal property of being. It is certainly a real process, consciousness that is, but it is not causally affectionate to the world of things. A “thought” does not affect the empirical world of forces and objects. It is instead an effect of a combination of material effects. As one of two modes of being, consciousness or mind is active insofar as it entertains an idea, and can get at nothing but an idea (does not reach the world causally or mechanically). These ideas are contingent to objective being, the only other mode of being and absolutely necessary for reality.

Although the sense data that affects us so that we respond to an environment is external to us, many of our ideas can be produced through means which do not involve direct immediate sensory experience. That is, in such things as memory, imagination, notion, and perhaps “intuition”, we conglomerate a world that moves about in our heads, full of imagery and words, thinking to ourselves, etc. But this is only a replication of what would be a real time experience, granted it does not involve impossible events.

Now I want you to consider this. We use terms which do not have as their object, things in the world. Not all words are nouns, in other words. The question then is how do such words obtain meaning, and unfortunately many philosophers like to think that just because many words represent ideas and not things, those things expressed with such terms are not inevitably reducible to external objective conditions.

In the case of the use of a word like “beauty” in a conversation, the term would be evoking a meaning that is improvised by the speaker, but be pragmatically grounded in real events, tacit agreements, and dramatic acts. This does indeed mean that at some point, an initial objective situation provided the possibility for such a term/concept to be formed. When someone had in mind the term “beauty”, they meant something very specific, but this doesn’t mean that the term must be understood as a term which can have an objective meaning. That is impossible. We know through deduction that material circumstances must precede the development of all instances in language, although every term takes on an improvisational meaning when being used.

The term “beauty”, therefore, cannot mean anything other than the sum total of events which were occurring when the term was/is being invented/used.

If it could mean something else, it is only because it has been used in new circumstances, but this does not detract from its original inception. Despite what the speaker meant when he made up the term “beauty”, there were very certain objective material conditions present when he did.

So even though ideas can be composed of terms which are not existentially quantifiable, such as adjectives, those terms have origin, use, and function in responding and subordinating the environment, the “world”.

Phenomenology claims that both Empiricism and Rationalism are erroneous. Reality is not “a priori” to experience, as representationalists such as Schopenhauer and Kant claim, and neither is it “posterior” to experience, as Locke and Hume claim. There is an objective reality which exists prior to experience but its meaningfulness cannot be interpreted without corresponding to intentional acts.

1+1=2 is an indifferent objective fact before it is experiences as a symbolic representation of objects in the world. But when it is actualized in consciousness and mediated in thought, it is an intentional structure used in a context of activity in the world. Math means something because as such symbol sets it represents real facts about the world which are not contingent to experience, but which don’t have any necessary meaning. They are indifferent ontological facts. As such, they are not yet a “reality” until they are experienced.

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Language explains this what; it is phenomenal–‘what’ is a product of human language, nothing more and nothing less. Nothing exists outside of all that we know. (Nothing also does not exist outside of language.)

It exists according to realism/objectivity. These are restrictive philosophical ideologies.

That’s not true. That’s not how negation originated in language. It originated as a confusion of category: “this is food” vs. “this is no(t) food”

Not necessarily or absolutely; existentialism through the Law of Identity is the essence and root of self-awareness.

The logic was incorrect; I never studied/read Sartre, but it sounds like his explanation is a classical one (post-modern?)–outdated now. The fundamental relation of human being to the ‘external world’ came from “what is” vs. “what is not”.

This depends on how you relate to the mind-body dualism. I personally reject this duality, so according to my logic, thoughts do affect the empirical world of forces and objects regardless of whether these ‘causes’ are direct or indirect.

Again, you are referring to the environment as “external to us”. I find this logic fundamentally flawed.

‘Objects’ equate to ‘things’. All ‘things’ are based on conceptual knowledge. All objects and things are ‘concepts’. All that we know, subjectively or objectively, is conceptual.

You cannot describe to me a meaningful term that is not a ‘thing’ insofar as all meaningful things–through language–are ‘concepts’.

Concepts are ‘word-relations’.

Exactly, but the subjective-objective dichotomy is outdated. There’s no need to think of ideas as strictly ‘out of existence’ somehow. All ‘things’ are concepts. All concepts are in play.

I agree with these statements about reality. Describing reality is a metaphysical endeavor.

“Before”??? Nothing is an ‘objective fact’ before experience.

1+1=2 is just a symbolic evolution of language. It is also strictly conceptual and directly pertaining to word relations.

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What is truth?

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Have you ever read Wallace Stevens? I highly recommend him. There’s a chance you might love his poetry as much as I do.

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I haven’t; thanks for the recommendation.

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Realunoriginal,

So you have arrived.

Welcome.

We missed you.

Dasein-the- World,

Language IS reality?

I have to say, I looked and looked at that phrase, but couldn’t wrap my brain around it. Maybe you could enlighten me on how you percieve reality, linguistically or otherwise, or how you are using the term ‘reality,’ or how you understand the term ‘reality,’ or what part of reality you are trying to encompass? I only ask because the closest phrase I could come up with was, ‘perception IS reality, and then we proceed to language it.’ And in languaging it, we nudge any poor dope sitting beside us telling him, sophistically, about our newly languaged reality. To which he responds, “huh?” … and thus informing us he has no clue … well, as to which reality we are talking about, anyway.

Which reminds me, north, until you can properly wield the term ‘sophist,’ I highly recommend you gently place it down, and walk away. This term can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Those hands being yours, at this point.