We are Answerable for what we Learn how to See

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

“We are answerable for what we learn how to see.”

This strange line speaks to a very important thing about our lives and the manner in which we are to be judged, both by ourselves and by others.

The question often, but perhaps not often enough arises, ‘why study philosophy…what is it one does with philosophy?’, and it comes to mind that philosophy is a kind of seeing. And just as there are many kinds of philosophy, there are many kinds of seeing. And with each kind of seeing, different kinds of objects, and hence experiences, and ultimately perhaps imperatives.

As Margaret Miles writes,

“After reading a great philosopher for a long time, you can stand at a window looking out and see the world as that philosopher saw it.”

What does it mean to be answerable for what we learn how to see? If it is true, and I believe that it is, that when you study a particular philosopher closely, you begin to see the very world that he/she saw, to be answerable to that sight means I would think to be accountable for what is revealed, but subtly perhaps, to be accountable for what is not revealed. In choosing who we study we are deciding in some regard what world we are going to live in, the shape it is going to take. There also is the sense that if we neglect such study, we still are answerable for “what we learn how to see”, beyond our intention, for we are always learning to see.

Philosophy liberates, in that it grants lenses in which certain aspects of the world gain clarity, but that clarity also produces a kind of obligation, a natural response to experience. So philosophy also confines. What is it in the world which we should not miss? What philosophy is at least equal to the cost of its objects?

I am reminded by this “answerability” of Heraclitus’ pronouncement, to which I regularly return, often translated as,

“Character is fate.”

The Greek is more subtle,

“Ethos” is a man’s “daimon”. Really, “One’s manner, is one’s ghost.”

We are answerable for what we have learned how to see. It gives pause when learning the next technique of sight. We are drawn to particular ways of seeing things, so we study them. Perhaps it is good to consider also the consequence of sight.

Dunamis

2

Dunamis

Concern for the consequences of sight is why Christ taught in parables. “Seeing” does not necessarily result in something good.

Many esoteric ideas or ideas pertaining to the evolution of our being are preserved in philosophy. The value of such ideas are secondary to their ability to allow a person the experience of esoteric thinking or the qualitative difference between levels of existence. However the experience cannot remain in our usual reactive states of being so the tendency is to interpret them which is where the danger comes in.

The esoteric meaning of "feet"is the outer part of a person that receives life’s impressions. From this perspective, your entire physical body is the feet of higher man. Often our entire lives are lived at this level which is why only the feet need cleaning.

Esoteric thinking and practices can allow the experience of life beyond the feet so we can begin to be touched at these levels. But they can quickly become distorted and their value loses its objectivity and becomes the property of our egotism.

Depending on the nature of the person such distortions can quickly just fade away or begin to cohere into something artificial that begins to starve our inner evolutionary potential or possibility for re-birth by denying it the objective impressions from life it needs to live and develop.

So from this perspective once we do begin to become aware of higher realities, we become responsible for acquiring the ability to put them into a more human perspective because not to do so will leave a person, in the objective sense, worse off then if they had never begun.

A little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing.

3

It is true that everything we think, say, and do carries consequences. It is also true that everything we think, say, and do are the same as what we do not think, say, and do. Our ‘knowing’ is also ‘not knowing’.

The study of philosophy or any other form of learning can and should broaden our view of that which is, but such study can only be efficacious when we release it and let it become an internalized part of what we are.

The ‘lens’ may present a shadowy form, but it is the illuminating light that we should attend to.

JT

4

Well, I got the two Religion Forum posters to post, :slight_smile: but I put this here in Philosophy for a reason. There is a sense in the study of philosophy that something neutral is being accomplished. But also something somehow ineffectual and “abstract”. I propose that even the most austere, contrained study, even that of Analytic Philosophy is nether “abstract”, nor neutral, but world summoning with consequence. It is this consequence, this bearing that is a stake when two people disagree.

Dunamis

5

A small point, but is “ghost” the best expression here? A ghost is always a left over, something from the past, something lingering here but should be somehwere else.

I have never studied Greek, but I have heard this word “daimon” expressed as “animating spirit” that is to say it is the force that moves one. It is weird. Like an outside agency it pushes us to act. Yet it is not alien. It is not different from the man, it is the man.

If one is not acting from ones character or being moved by one’s own animating spirit then one is untrue.

This idea tends to get lost as slogans,

“Know Thyself”
“To thine own self be true.”
“Follow your Bliss.”

Yet as simple as each one is to say they are all difficult to love. It requires genuine love, with all the joy, dedication, time, patience, kindness, and affection that love demands to do philosophy.

One can study philosophy loveless. Yet such a student is no philosopher.

6

Xander,

“A small point, but is “ghost” the best expression here? A ghost is always a left over, something from the past, something lingering here but should be somehwere else.”

A small, but important point. I translate to ghost to capture the undermeaning of the word, which in this context is often obscured by the translation “fate”. One’s “daimon”, from which we get the word “demon” etymologically, is simply one’s spirit, which in some of Plato is treated as a kind of guardian spirit, or angel (using Christian iconography), something that leads you to the land of the dead, a guide. It is in many senses your representative on another plane. Socrates though spoke of his daimon as a kind of inner voice, a conscience that kept him performing particular actions, such as taking political office, etc. By translating it as “ghost” you are right, it does give the sense of something from the past, but this is somehow implicit in the phrase, because the totalization of one’s Ethos, one’s customs, ways of doing things, manner of being, becomes a spiritual residue, not altogether alien to the idea of karma as a consequence of actions. All of these ideas become condensed into the word “fate” in a kind of theological synthesis performed by translators, but in the Greek it is unsynthesized. As to this thing “lingering”, there is a sense, if you deny the afterworld, that the sum of your actions and manner does remain behind you as a living ghost, a spirit that still affects others after your death. By translating daimon as ghost, it leaves it undetermined, where the ghost will end up, drifting on this earth affecting, or translating an essence into the beyond. In the Greek though, the coherence of the world gives one the sense that if you act well enough, in harmony with things, you will be granted the fate of a better afterlife, by means of that daimon, even the status of the heroic.

Dunamis

7

When we look at just the seeing aspect of our being it goes into many areas of knowing. I can see that reading someones perspective allows us to glimpse into other worlds. What’s interesting is the very multidimensioness of seeing. In the West World seeing takes on the role of the consciousness or better yet deductive reasoning; The emphasizes is on measureing, abstracting, categorizing, analizing, etc…In the East World the seeing becomes intuitive in form and is more like the unconscious; the emphasizes is in myths, metaphors, symbols, allogies, etc…

Lao Tzu:

He who pursues learning will increase everyday;
He who pursues Tao will decrease everyday.

8

Careful achilles, you could end up being one of those religion forum posters! :stuck_out_tongue:

Dunamis,

That each of us forms a world view from our experiencing, (roller skating to reading every philosopher ever published) and that how we see and act are consequences of that experiencing is a given. A tautology: “A man sees what he sees”

Philosophy is never neutral as there is no ‘standing away’ from our experiencing. But that is true of all mind/body activity. There is no such thing as an absence of consequence, whether we see it or not. That we exist in form is a consequence, is it not?

Acting well enough, in harmony with things, granting a better afterlife? Well, perhaps.

Please excuse my density, but where are you going with this?

JT

9

Tentative,

“Please excuse my density, but where are you going with this?”

Why is it that you have to see everything in terms of “going somewhere”, as if that “somewhere” can be judged apart from the “going”?

Careful achilles, you could end up being one of those religion forum posters!

I too am one of “those religion forum posters”. Religion is a genre’d discourse, as is Philosophy. I post this within Philosophy so as to have the question/point of view answered within that genre, those rules of meaning. Of course any one is free to answer however they wish. :slight_smile: But this question is much easier to answer within Religious discourse, and more difficult within Philosophy. It is that difficulty that is the “somewhere” I am going.

Dunamis

10

Let me open up my ideas a little more…

Seeing…has traditionaly been an association to observation. What is it that we observe? Some say nature, some say ourselves, some say the world without time.

Seeing is also the conditioning to Epistemology. In the eightfold path in Buddhism the first is right seeing then folows right knowing. This interrelationship gets very interesting… Are we seeing and then knowing or have we known and through seeing bring us forward? Is the divine spark in us all? [Put it this way we have to think that being in the womb for 9 months- all of us- that we are knowing with out seeing.]

There is alot to chew through! and philosophy has allowed us to see through others.

I’ll leave you with a quote…

Don Juan: My predilection is to see…because only by seeing can a man of knowledge know.

11

There is a point where philosophy and our questions of spirituality meet. It’s a fuzzy line, and I’ve never heard two people agree as to where philosophy leaves off and religion begins. Whether our questions are about the nature of nature, or the nature of God, or… it is about our relationship to that whatever you wish to call it that fuels both philosophy and religion.

Uh, I don’t. I was simply responding to your statements that there is some sort of qualitative difference and concommittent consequences in our seeing and doing. For me, our going and being are the same, even as we abstract out bits and pieces the better to ‘philosophise’. The distinctions being made are yours, not mine.

That said, I’m still not sure what your point is. I’ve agreed with most everything you’ve said, but I can’t gather the gist of the distinctions being made.

Enlighten me.

JT

12

Hi achilles

I believe you’ve touched on something important. What does it mean to see and what do we believe in us that sees?

Western philosophy came into existence I believe in the sixth or seventh century before Christ. Philosophy means “love of wisdom.” This implies that wisdom was missing or somehow lost from normal life.

Perhaps the study of Western philosophy as initiated in the Greek civilization didn’t need to exist in the Orient or in Egypt since it was never really lost and didn’t have to be regained.

Their knowledge was more symbolic representation of direct picture consciousness. The conscious experience of cosmic phenomena negated the need to think about them with an aspect of our thought, “dualistic thought”, inadequate for anything more than minimal understanding and resulting in the creation of a corrupted ego.

Here it becomes fascinating since the corrupt ego consciousness that we be3lieve doesthe “seeing” but divides a person from the perceived phenomena and creates such beautiful thought through its preconceptions, because it is only a caricature, denies the objective goal of understanding human meaning and purpose.

So the consequences of being caught up in the beauty of philosophy and ones ability to adapt it for the purpose of our corrupt ego’s justification is in the sacrifice of the necessary truth for the development of our being it denies. One has to be able to let it go in purusit of understanding if the desire is to understand.

Of course in Christianity it is the Holy Spirit that can fill the void normally filled with our imagination comprising the corrupt ego allowing for the “seeing” (experience) of levels of wholeness from the whole of oneself but that’s another matter.

13

I read up on the “Daimons” gig, and you know what, Dunamis? I think I got four or five fighting over me.

What should I do? Which ones do I listen to?

Sometimes they tell me to open fire on a McDonalds. Other times they tell me to go placidly amid the noise and haste, to remember what peace there may be in silence.

Is it possible to be both a God and a Devil? ‘Cause I think I got em’ runnin’ all through me.

14

Tent,

It’s a fuzzy line, and I’ve never heard two people agree as to where philosophy leaves off and religion begins.

The “fuzzy line” is that which lies between “faith” and “doubt”. Each priviledges one of over the other.

“I’ve agreed with most everything you’ve said, but I can’t gather the gist of the distinctions being made.”

By posing the question, and inviting response, I discover the gist of the distinctions being made.

Dunamis

15

detrop,

“What should I do? Which ones do I listen to?”

Listen to Heraklitus, your ethos determines your daimon.

Dunamis

16

Where do I get an Ethos?

Can I order one, or does a local department store carry them?

17

detrop,

Where do I get an Ethos?

Your ethos is what you do. You make it act by act. In other words you make your daimon.

Dunamis

18

Do you make a distinction between an act and an intention?

If I intend on racing to an intersection to help an old lady cross the road, and I accidentally run over a little kid on the way, does my Daimon get good points or bad points?

19

detrop,

“Do you make a distinction between an act and an intention?”

Intention is a ghostly projection both upon ourselves and others. There only are acts.

Dunamis

20

Then these summations do not work, friend:

There is no “you” in these equations, and in that sense it is pointless to assume that one’s daimon is determined by an agency. It appears that they come ‘pre-packaged,’ and to suggest that my actions determine my daimon is equivalent to talking to the daimon itself.

Better for you to say that our acts are expressions of forces that control us rather than saying that Daimons are agents that are determined by our actions. There is no “our” here in the formula you provide. It is redundant.