It is ridiculous and absurd but I don’t think violence is the solution to all of this. But yes, it is very hard not noticing the entire absurdity of this world.
Understanding and enlightenment is the answer to this broken world wanting to repair it. Anything beyond that merely leads to a path of self destruction and annihilation.
I am a cynic and often enough a pessimist myself but there is a part of me that wants to see humanity evolve for the better. There’s a part of me that wants a better future for all of mankind.
Whether or not this ever happens has yet to remain to be seen. And if it never happens then you’ll get the nihilistic self destruction you’re always talking about, but for me that would be an extreme tragedy not worth celebrating at all as that would be total existential defeat.
"The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”
“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”
I like Camus and Heidegger, two best philosophers of the 20th century. They seem very different but they have some things in common when it gets down to it. For example Heidegger being the most autistic writer ever, and Camus the least autistic.
What makes you say Camus was autistic? I have read a lot of by him and I think he’s pretty damned adept at the human psyche. Have you read his notebooks? They’re beautiful.
Sartre, he is one chunk of OCD. Kierkegaard is someone I don’t understand the appeal of, he was definitely autistic but not in a funny way like Heidegger. Just a guy always one step behind and then drudgily over-examining what went wrong so he was behind the next step as well.
(PS this is a challenge for you Kierkegaardians out there to set me straight)
I think the value of Kierkegaard’s entire ouvre lies in one single thing. Folly or glory, right or wrong. I think he knew that, and is why he was fairly careless.
That thing is the realization that Platonic objective truth not existing does not prevent truth from nevertheless existing. Everything after that was questions. Fair ones.
He was like a rock star who made a song so good he knew he could do whatever he wants.
Plato imagined basically a coneptual, human readable map existing on the same level of reality as anything that can be called reality, mapping all of it.
This doesn’t exist, which has led many a nihilist to talk themselves into endearing circles.
But what Kierkegaard realized is that both conceptualization and reality, thus truth, exist. He simply readjusted the idea of the plane any mapping exists on. Reality precedes all mappings (thus also his obsession with God). But because reality does exist, and conceptualization, it can nevertheless be mapped, and even with the criteria known as truth.
This leads to a much more morassy world than Plato had hoped to have to deal with, but also one much more ungraspably immense. In any case, the real world.
That is a very powerful endorsement. I went to read some texts and they were much more vivid than I remember him, even a bit frightening.
Plato could never be frightening or solicit any kind of passion, just annoyance at the sycophancy of Socrates so called interlocutors. His philosophy is a pristine little sanitized bubble, a precious little box. I do prefer it swampy.
I can never get on board with full Socrates or Plato hate. He took the practice of refining an idea to a whole new level. To reason something out in small steps, defending it all the way. I don’t believe it had quite been done before. That’s what makes reading his dialogues so engrossing.
What has been misestimated is what was behind this process. It wasn’t access to the Topus Uranus. It was a human reasoning faculty divorced from the underlying reality that gives relief to truth. In this confusion, the space for confidence tricks was, of course, opened.
I continue to see Plato as the slackening of the Greek will.
Wat was actually good, healthy and happy fell apart in a body of false syllogisms. Asymptotically approaching a refinery of falsity that has, to the inept thinker, the appearance of truth.
Wittgenstein is right when he denounces the syllogism as a method for attaining meaning (and ‘good’ is perhaps the ultimate meaning); he observes that we can only speak meaningfully in positive statements. Like “John is the guy who lived on Pituitary Street 5, Gloucester, when he walked to the bakery on the morning of February 5st 2001 and had himself a fatty croissant with orange jelly which he enjoyed quite a bit.” And not from “John = John”, which is not only tautological but potentially false, since we can never step into the same John twice.
So yes Plato introduced a new intellectual method, but a profoundly unsound one. I personally can’t stand the ridiculousness of it. It took two thousand years of silence and then Francis Bacon and Descartes to get some blood running again. Where Bacon replaced the vapid syllogism with the dirty experimental search for consistency in direct experience (science), so as to attain what you might call phenomenal certainty, and Descartes made the first attempt to ground metaphysics (“I”) into direct experience, so as to attain what you might call noumenal certainty.
Both of which are still not ‘true’, but they’re fertile. This is all not new.
A potentially new thing I can say is that Heidegger finally gets to the core of the syllogism itself as a being. He does this by throwing the syllogistic method again and again and again against the utterly nonsyllogistic atom-blast Nietzsche, until it cracks. And then closes again, but you can catch a glimpse. And then you get to tie in noumenal certainty with phenomenal certainty, and you get a fusion which is kind of dangerous. Sure messed up my hair.
Inept, I mean… you say modern science comes from Bacon, but all of it comes from Plaro. Down to the academy. When the Arabs created modern math and chemestry and physics and advanced geometey, there was no Bacon. There was (the pureblooded Platonist) Archimedes.
The whole idea that science can be isolated feom engineering and pursued for the simple sake of rarification is only Platonic, started din Platonic geometry, and is directly derived from the Socratic method.
There is no such thing as Platonic geometry. There is just Plato’s idolatry of geometry, a thing to which he could not attain and which he profoundly misunderstood. Have you read Plato on these things?
You’re right about Archimedes being the first instance of what would later grow to be the scientific method, but the fact is that Platonism and Aristoteleanism stifled that approach until Bacon understood its potential to be developed into a method.
I mean. Yes I have read Plato. He had some definitr opinions on geometry, based mainly on Pythagoras but Socratified, which he taught in his schools to the likea of Aristotle, a line which eventually told Archimedes “you can only use a compass and a ruler because otherwise its not perfect revealed Topus Uranus truth and bla bla bla” and Archimedes went: “ yes here have the next 3000 years.”
