I’m sure there’s been an “objectivism vs. relativism” post somewhere here, but I doubt that it has been worded like so:
Paradox. The statement: “There is such a thing as an absolute entity” is itself an entity consisting of an absolute statement, meaning that no statement shows the statement to be inconsistent with itself – except, of course, the statement: “there is no such thing as an absolute entity.”
Paradox. The statement: “There is no such thing as an absolute entity” is itself an entity consisting of an absolute statement, meaning that no statement shows the statement to be inconsistent with itself – except, of course, the statement: “there is such a thing as an absolute entity.”
When thinking about these two paradoxes, my mind went in all directions. It seemed futile to me to strive towards a system of thought, of logos more broadly I suppose, which should bind the kosmos as a whole together; there will always be something outside my current system of thought that will come and dismantle or confound it.
Ought I to reject the foundations of Western logic, which require one’s argument to be without refutation or contradiction to be sure? Would rejecting the law of non-contradiction even solve the problems I vaguely sense lying under the appearance of the problems presented by such an antinomy?
Or in another direction: Ought I to assume some absolute entity which consists of incorruptible truth, order, power and the like, or assume only a multiplicity (as opposed to a universe) in which each thing comes to change? But if there is an all-consistent rule that all things are rather soluble (non-absolute, able to deconstruct or to be confounded) then the all-consistent rule must not be all-consistent, since it may be conquered by the entity which confounds it (that is, itself, since it does not itself change and dismantles its own rule).
I don’t even know how to direct this outspill of thoughts into a single direction of discussion. I’ll have to leave that up to the individual responders.
Nothing is ‘sure’ unless that is the way that you ‘feel’. EgoicPerspective is ‘sure’, ‘beliefs’ are ‘sure’… Western philosophy, Aristotle, is full of error! Paradox is a sure sign of error! There is no paradox in truth.
The ‘law’ of non-contradiction, and similar ‘laws’, are not universal ‘laws’. They have been refuted as such! They are no more than ‘local relics’ of Perspective, pragmatic…
‘Objective’ and ‘subjective’ are both artifacts of Perspective. Everything can be seen as ‘subjective’. Everything can be seen as ‘objective’, and the whole spectrum between!
Divvying up existence into little byte-sized ‘thought piles’ (for ease of consumption) is what ‘thought’ does; hence the value of meditation.
The law of non-contradiction is a way of saying “There is no paradox in truth”. When I put both these collections of your statements together, you are saying that while “[t]here is no paradox in truth”, to believe so is “no more then ‘local relics’ of Perspective”.
What do you think are the benefits of thinking as if there is objectivity in truth or order, thinking as if there is subjectivity in truth or order, whether there is only one or the other or both?
In a word, yes. The only alternative to such an assumption (which I’ve accepted for many years), is total, subjective chaos in the natural universe. After that, it’s still fairly simple. Truth is God, wherever it leads. But there are aspects to that Truth: natural law (pure objectivity), justice, love (blends) and beauty/art (pure subjective Truth).
Can God (if He exists) do otherwise, and yet maintain our free will?
Can we save the world? We can’t even save one country without cries of “Imperialism”. Do you donate all your spare time and money to aiding “the poor”? If so you need to leave the US or Western society to do it.
Not the way that I see it. The ‘law of non-contradiction’ is erroneous and fallacious, but locally pragmatic nontheless. Truth transcends the ‘local’ and the ‘pragmatic’.
What I am saying is that Truth transcends the vagaries of Perspective; that paradox is found to be Perspectival, local. Paradox is found in ‘thought’. Truth transcends thought.
I don’t know what the ‘benefits’ of being ‘me’ might be. I am who/that I am. I see things how I must, according to my nature. I can support ‘objectivity’ logically and rationally, and also ‘subjectivity’ equally so. The only ‘benefit’ from seeing various Perspectives is that one is less likely to get embroiled in an egoic argument in defense of one’s particular and limited POV.
It is for you to determine (or not) whether there are ‘benefits’ to being you. “For every Perspective, there is an equal and opposite Perspective.” - First Law of Soul Dynamics (Soul = Conscious Perspective)
Boo hoo hooo!! (crying alligator tears!)
Lots of people die, not just children. Are they more special, other than by idiotic sentimentality and personal bias, than adults? The elderly?
I think that you might be the only one that “supposes” humanity to be “empathic”. I have observed very little.
Are you yourself running about clucking like the mother hen, with no money in the bank or wallet because you are running about saving the world? Did you sell your computer to feed some baby somewhere for a year? Drive an old beater, or an SUV? Wear older clothes, nothing fancy so you can ‘adopt a child’ somewhere?
All i hear is sentimental (self deceptive) wind and ego!
Pffft!
Unfortunately from what I’ve seen of the Western tradition, the absolute entity (be it called God, the Absolute, the One or something else like “natural law” or the logos for the ancient Greek equivalent) either must be completely detached from our world (Plato, gnostics) or is the sum of our world (Spinoza, Hegel, Deleuze in a less direct sense). The neo-Platonists (Plotinus) and many Christian theologians considered (or consider, for those working in the now) the absolute or infinite being to contain the world within itself, also to transcend it. I consider the last option (panentheism) to really be pantheism without real variation from it. I make this assertion because I don’t believe that one could draw a clear line between the end of a finite entity ‘the world’ and the beginning of the infinite entity – to make boundaries for an entity and call it infinite or undefineable is absurd.
In the case of “the nameless one” of Plato, absolution has nothing to do with anything relevant to us, so we are still left to deal with this “total, subjective chaos” you pointed out, without any aid of this absolute chimera beyond even ‘beyondness’ itself. We cannot even properly name its attributes, as Plato notes, since to do so would define the undefineable – much less call on this absolute order to relate to our need to better order our thoughts and understanding of the self and the not-self. To do so would be to subject the insubjectible[sp?] to our finite desire of merely learning progressively more – absurd and impossible to it, since it is neither commensurable to increase nor to decrease.
In the latter case, the absolute is composed of the solute, of said intersubjective chaos; by being its totality or all-consistency, it exhibits characteristics opposite to those of its parts. (I’ll stop all this mentioning of ‘chaos’ because I prefer to see it rather as the interplay and intermingling of an infinity of finite orders.) Deleuze baldly accepts a paradox in his metaphysics by summarizing it in the phrase: “plurality = monism” – in other words, the plurality of finite objects constructs the one substance by which all things are composed. But I’ve discovered a subconscious motion in the interpretation of the God-or-Nature of Spinoza by several atheists – they seem to speak of “Spinoza’s God” as if such God were not so, counting Spinoza (and consequently Albert Einstein, who spoke of believing in “the God of Spinoza”) as an atheist. They’re wrong on that, if they read Einstein’s frustrated comments about being categorized as an atheist; he considered the bulk of Western atheists arrogant and didn’t want to be associated with them, as well as wanting to differentiate his metaphysics and those of Spinoza from simple atheism – it’s a nuanced difference, but one that seems to have been important to them. But that’s trivial – I’m sure if these atheists, who want Einstein and Spinoza in their camp, were pressed, they would assert that they merely mean a rejection of traditional monotheist metaphysics. Why I’m mentioning it is that it seemed (mistakenly) to me that they were rejecting a unity to things and that I followed the idea for curiosity’s sake. What sense is there to name a unity, a universe of things at all? Shouldn’t one reject God (in the sense that the madman of Nietzsche accused the West of doing – that is, of rejecting absolute value and embracing nihilism) and accept chaos (or a less frightening term for it, like multiplicity or plurality)?
But since I’m not that insightful, I can’t dig beyond mere appearances of ideas and entities considered. I say that because I’m looking at this multiplistic metaphysics, based on the ideas that each thing is finite and no thing is infinite (perhaps equating infinity with zero in a mathematical system that may necessarily result from it), and up comes a problem. There seems to appear a rule that is all-consistent, a thing commonly shared and consisting of the composition of all things – that all things are finite. If that all-consistent rule, however, is omnipresent, it is not bound and defined by anything outside, since it consists of all things and nothing is outside it to provide its boundaries. It breaks its own rule, that all things are finite, undefineable, by being unbounded, undefined by something. If one points out that the all-consistent entity is indeed bound, in a sense, by not being any individual or collective part of it, but rather the whole alone, then it is not truly all-consistent, because it consists only of the whole of all things, rather than only certain parts of the whole. It should follow by such reasoning that all parts of the whole are outside the whole, since they are not the same thing as the whole. When I see this absurdity, I may throw up my hands and proclaim nihilism again, rejecting that there is no all-consistent rule that all things are finite, but then this allows for the infinite entity, and thus allows for the all-consistent rule that all things are finite again.
I have discovered that I cannot conquer the logos with my reasoning. Q.E.D.
Being stubborn (stupid), however, I attack from the pragmatist’s angle: is there a practical benefit contained in theories associated with this problem? How may one gain the most psychological benefit – even mixing different theories or those parts of them that contain the benefits?
And so those children ought to have stopped dreaming and playing games of pretend together, where things might have had at least an illusion of being better than their more concrete, miserable situation that they couldn’t fix?
These discussions may lead me to a knowledge that keeps me from dying “for very little reason at all, in pain.” Personally, that to which has been referred in this discussion as “chaos” frightens me and thus appears to strongly merit my discussion. If it seemed “abstract rubbish” to me, then I could dismiss it as (hopefully) unimportant and ponder some other matter. Suppose I run into a child who is dying painfully and the child needs someone who has confronted this “chaos” in reflection and knows how to face it. If I persevered in my search until I learned or acquired something of use, I may be able to help them to face the absurd inhumanity that is consuming them at that moment. “Man does not live on bread alone” (Deut. 8:3) and caring for this our absurd species includes and extends far beyond merely filling stomachs and bloodstreams with vaccine. Otherwise, we would never see the rich commit suicide, fully fed and covered by the best medical insurance money can buy.
I’m dying painfully of not knowing whether the absurdity is worth fighting anymore. And you continue to tell me about other people dying painfully as their bodies figure it’s not worth fighting anymore. I appreciate that you pointed out the problem you see; I hope we’ll move on to a solution now. This discussion is a legitimate part of that search for a reason to live in the first place, because I used to put that search into this idea I had of an infinite god who was somehow still partial to my well-being and after much reflection I don’t think I can believe that anymore. I know forum discussions point to the issues and not the discussers, but you needed proof that this discussion wasn’t distant to the human condition. In fact, it’s very close to home. People wouldn’t think about whether there’s objective truth and shit like that unless it at least appeared to have some personal relevance.
Are you…? Are you really dying painfully…? Is your belly swollen to bursting point…? Are you being forced at the point of a machete to rape your own mother whilst another carves up your father like a sunday roast…? I suspect not. Are you being herded into a wooden church, oh so dry, oh so inflamable…? By your once neighbors, your once friends…?
I suspect not.
But sorry, sorry for disturbing you. That ivory tower must have taken so long to build, you are quite right to be proud of its height, its solitude, its quietness. So sorry, so sorry for you.
And another, btw.
Perhaps this God you speak of, having given us the ability to care for others, expected you to use it…?
Oh, so people are dying more painfully than me. You’re not paying attention to what I’ve typed: if I don’t even know if life is worth living anymore, why would I go help someone live? I don’t care right now. I am incapable of it. If that constitutes an ivory tower, you’re right, I’m in one. If you continue to hound me like a troll, I will shut you out of my tower, because you’d rather mock me than help me in my pain. I will assume you’re doing this to gratify some weird, sadistic desire of yours and you’d be the weirdest troll I’ve encountered.
So my little pained one, my poor dove, tell me. Tell me why, if you are unwilling to help another, indeed seemingly unwilling even to hear of the very existance of others, others more needy than yourself, more grandly agonized, should you yourself expect aid from a stranger…?
Surely a little mockery simply solidifies your worldview. Perhaps then, I am doing you a favour afterall…?
Now see, I am on topic in my trolling: I have created a paradox of my very own. Helping while unhelping.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you appear to be experiencing a crisis of purpose. Agnosticism or nihilism are lousy choices and either is a bitter pill to swallow. Using Einstein as an example, was he happy? Is happiness our goal. It’s nice but I don’t think so. He never used the term, but I believe he was a deist (a panendeist if you want to go off into pure speculation), so he lived with ultimate doubt. Is that all there is then, doubt and a modicum of happiness?
I think fulfillment is what he sought, the highest order of human endeavor, for him and all of us. Even those who suffer greatly can and have achieved great fulfillment. But if your internal drive doesn’t push you down one of the infinite paths to Truth and fulfillment as Einstein obviously found, what is there? If you’ve truly drawn a blank, I don’t know; but I’m guessing the odds of that are infinite to one.
Of course, there’s the problem of the value of humanity in the first place. “So I contribute, so what?” “Is that all there is?” “What’s the point?” It’s the primal doubt, and the only partially effective antidote is the pathetic concept of hope. You want to tell God to “Bite me!”, but the silence only says “You don’t even know if I’m here”. Hope sucks, but it’s all we got. I think this realization dawning on some cave man was the reason alcohol was discovered. In Vino Est Veritas (and courage).
There are no paradoxes. There are differing perspectives from people attempting to find stable meanings and values while experiencing change. There are no absolutes. There are norms that allow us a stable ground for a point of view. This does not amount to relativism anymore than is noting that there is a variety of plants in which each is a plant.
Your OP digs into philosophical discussions that go back to prehistory. The fact that these discussions generally peter out as relativism or infinite regress proves that they are incapable of envisioning a whole in process without wanting that whole to be a final end, a closure of doubts. Where Spinoza’s attempt to describe a whole, even if he called it god, is noteworthy is his attempt to show that what is considered mental, physical or spiritual is inseparable, that these ways of seeing belong to creatures whose knowing is process, never final end. The dynamic or diachronic approach to a human sense of reality exposes all paradoxes, absolutisms and either/ors.
I strongly believe that the universe is a unified whole (Truth, God) and most likely, if there is something beyond, that this is a part of that whole as well. Yes, there are dualities, doubt and the unknown, objective surety and conflict of perspectives, yet we expand the finite objective universe with our infinite subjectivity. We are what makes the whole infinite, but not being completely privy to its objective framework, we can only expand our knowledge in an impossible yet rewarding effort to stave off our doubt, ignorance and those who promote ignorance.
You’re still not paying attention to what I’m typing: This particular problem is more urgent to me than those of others. Those who do not have more urgent problems than helping me can certainly help me if they feel so inclined – if not, it will just take longer. If we’re going to talk rule of reciprocity, I question whether you’d want someone to mock you condescendingly in order to ‘teach’ you something, or to choose a more respectful mode of conversation.
And yet you’re seeing that it’s not doing me a favor. I’m still stubbornly clinging to my object of focus, which hasn’t gotten any clearer from your efforts to replace it with what you’ve already stated in the first post (“talking metaphysics is pointless; go help a child”). It may just be someday that you and I are at a meeting discussing plans to help those babies, but right now I don’t (can’t, rather) give a damn. For now I would appreciate it if you only spoke according to the topic given, or spend your time on other topics on other threads. If your position is that “metaphysics is irrelevant,” then argue that position to the points that have been made. “This point concerning metaphysics is irrelevant because…” etc. No more rhetoric, no more condescension, no more accusations of the ignorance of children – the latter two are pretty improperly ad hominem according to official forum rules, anyway.
I don’t know if it makes sense to call things unified; as in the example I noted: there’s no conceivable system of logic that takes all statements and eliminates their contradictory nature toward each other. Also the system would be simple and without differentiation or parts; in order to separate a thing into parts there must be distance or difference between – that is, something separating – the two or more parts – thus a level of disunity. I think it’s more sensible to speak of varying levels of unity/separation among the members of collective entities – if each thing be finite, then each group of things have a measurable distance or difference of composition from one another. I’m uneasy about considering infinity; to attempt to do so as if it were a closed-off whole is to envision it as a finite thing. Ierrellus points this out:
It seems common-sensical to keep this in mind, but even our understanding of the undefinable is a finite image in our head. I don’t know if at such a point I should reject the notion of infinity as it is constructed on empirical grounds, or hold onto it for its necessity to some function.
