If the philosopher can’t explain his understanding of some super deep idea to his grandmother in a way that she’ll understand, then he doesn’t really understand.
is that right?
suppose grandma (or any someone) feels a very strong aversion to those kinds of questions (or the ideas themselves - tell me, how shall one go about explaining to one’s devoutly Roman Catholic grandmother how and why one became an atheist?
please tell me you see the absurdity here
Do you understand why you became an atheist? Do you have some beautiful deep poetic answer, or a concrete one? I think she’ll understand the later one, if you yourself understand it sufficiently. Besides, I’m not saying that you should be able to make a retarded person understand what you mean for you to truly understand something, or even that your own understanding depends on someone else’s understanding of your understanding. What I"m saying is that there is nothing you truly understand if you cannot convey that which you understand in a way which a reasonable person could get it, or in other words, if you cannot put what you understand into a coherent sentence.
i was asking you
because i am anything but an atheist - hell you might even call me a polytheist (though I would be misunderstood)
yet i understand atheism only because i’ve dabbled with it in the past, I am something of a former atheist who’s strongly considered its premises, reasons, conclusions, etc. and taken on that perspective - speaking of which, what do you suppose old Nietzsche meant by ‘for what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear’?
he who has ears to hear, let him hear - but what if grandma lacks the ear, and remains deaf to my reasoning?
how about you? you got ears bro?
to a genuinely philosophical thinker, a hardy courage eventually becomes as necessary as his intellect - because truth is hard and strikes deep
self-knowledge demands the greatest personal courage
why? because beneath our masks and pretensions, we all fear our truth, truth be told
Bro. I got ears, bro.
What about you? Do you have eyes?
Are you still talking about truth? Sheesh…
Part One
On the Prejudices of Philosophers
1
The will to truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a daring exploit, that celebrated truthfulness of which all philosophers up to now have spoken with respect, what questions this will to truth has already set down before us! What strange, serious, dubious questions! There is already a long history of that—and yet it seems that this history has scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that at some point we become mistrustful, lose patience and, in our impatience, turn ourselves around, that we learn from this sphinx to ask questions for ourselves? Who is really asking us questions here? What is it in us that really wants “the truth”? In fact, we paused for a long time before the question about the origin of this will—until we finally remained completely and utterly immobile in front of an even more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth. Why should we not prefer untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth stepped up before us—or were we the ones who stepped up before the problem? Who among us here is Oedipus? Who is the Sphinx?* It seems to be a tryst between questions and question marks. And could one believe that we are finally the ones to whom it seems as if the problem has never been posed up to now, as if we were the first ones to see it, to fix our eyes on it, and to dare confront it? For there is a risk involved in this—perhaps there is no greater risk.
Logical capacity my friend.
Why would this person be considered the deepest philosopher if others could swim along side them?
Listen man, if you understand how to say something in one way, then you know how to say it in another way. Therefore, if some smart guy learns of some complex idea and truly understands the idea, then he ought to be able to rephrase it in a lay way without losing meaning. Unless…you assume that there are some things that can’t be rephrased without losing meaning, or maybe you think somebody can be deep and also incapable of rephrasing something he understands in another way.
No i just think there are some things that no matter how they are phrased will not make sense to some people.
I have to explain my logical inferences all the time. If someone i’m trying to explain something to lacks pertinent knowledge, is incapable of acquiring said knowledge (perhaps due to density or span) then there is no way to get any logic across.
If i have an intricate understanding of the japanese fish market and i said something “deep” about it it would soar over your head.
now let’s say that mentally you are unable to comprehend the fish market as i do. no amount of simplification would help, it would simply turn into memorization.
Only if the fish market operates in a way completely unlike any other system on earth that I have knowledge of, in which case I would doubt that your own understanding is anything beyond memorization. Human understanding works (a lot of it, anyway) by connecting like and unlike systems together, that’s why kids are taught the concept of opposites at such an early age. Now, if your entire life revolves around the fish market, as a philosopher’s might revolve around his philosophy, then that system will likely be the one you connect all new ideas to. You start to see the world in terms of the movement of fish (the tetris effect?), and if that’s your root from which all other concepts stem then I can understand how it would be difficult to near impossible to restate it in terms of something else. But that’s a problem of psychology, nothing to do with the actual “deepness” of what you think you understand, more to do with the way in which your narrow focus has left you bereft of another system with a similar scope to compare it to.
heheheh, good points…
The fish market wasn’t really a solid example. in reality i was thinking it could apply to an understanding of the nature of atoms, how they interact, work, or are formed.
Imagine if i tried to describe it as a big series of mathmatic equations, but it simplym turned into a giant incomprehensible series of functions, constants, and equations.
you might be able to understand parts of it separately, but grasping the concept all at once in a working big picture of things could require more computational brain power than one of us has.
That is true, hence I said the OT is existential philosophy. I didn’t deny the philosophical power, I merely delineated the difference between what the post-Socratic Greeks brought to philosophy and what is found in the OT. And classical Greek philosophy did not borrow from the OT, which was precisely my point. They brought something new to philosophy; they brought reason to the forefront of philosophy, whereas the religious traditions maintained faith as the center. It is a radically different conception of a human being, existentially speaking.
William Barret sums it up best,
“The man of faith is the concrete man in his wholeness. Hebraism does not raise its eyes to the universal and abstract; its vision is always of the concrete, particular, individual man. The Greeks, on the other hand, were the first thinkers in history; they discovered the universal, the abstract and timeless essences, forms, and Ideas. The intoxication of this discovery (which marked nothing less than the earliest emergence and differentiation of the rational function) led Plato to hold that man lives only in so far as he lives in the eternal.”
Euthyphro could reference the Gods to justify his actions because he had faith. Abraham could do the same. Socrates demanded that the God(s) be subject to reason, and therein lies the great divide between the two traditions. Greek man honored the intellect–I’m talking post-Socratic philosophy–Hebraic man honored the heart. The Hebrews and the derivative religions that followed, are concerned with practice. Hence you get all the existential philosophy in the poetry of the OT, like Ecclesiastes, but nothing about universals, essences, Ideas. And it is out of this move that we have Western Science and the philosophies up to Nietzsche. Nietzsche being the man who decided to re-think the Western tradition, bringing back existentialism into the mix.
But here it is very important to note that Nietzsche was not an irrationalist–he did not deny the power and benefits of rationalism, rather, he sought to curtail their absolute dominance over philosophy since the days of Plato. He did not refute Apollo, he simply wanted to bring Dionysus back into it.
…the one who, as he goes in search of his life, lives the life he finds along the way in the moment.
=D>
no seriously =D> =D>
when i said that we fear our truth, what is it you suppose i meant?
because this excerpt you selected from BG&E speaks directly to my (admittedly rather short and cryptic) point - but on the fucking mark, well done =D> =D> =D>
tell me, xzc, since you were evidently bold enough to quote the man–indeed does this not presume some depth of understanding on your part, so to generate actual, substantive meaning?-- so let us hear your account of what N is describing here
what do you suppose he means? what are your thoughts?
so you have ears, now let us hear some thoughts
Amor Fati,
for what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear’?
If Nietzsche writes about the struggle of a spirit overcome by terror and fear of nothingness in the face of a godless world, and readers have not experienced for themselves this godless world, his words will have no ears. One will always be looking upon Nietzsche from a distance, unable to identify and internalize this very real–existential–terror and fear. The same reader may return decades later, having experienced a world without god, and suddenly Nietzsche makes sense . . . they have their own experience which they bring into the text. Foucault argued it is not what you take out of a text, but what you bring to it. These are virtually the same ideas.
From personal experience, I can illustrate a good example. I’d read Nietzsche and thought he was slightly mad when he wrote so passionately about resentment, and how to overcome it. It may even have been said that I had a certain intellectual capacity to explain to someone Nietzsche’s beliefs about resentment. What was wrong with it, what one must do to overcome it. But I had no real knowledge, felt no real pathos, because I myself had never been in a situation where I had come to resent another individual.
Later in my life, it just so happened that I encountered a Christian professor whom I challenged and fought for an entire semester. Ultimately, the woman gave me an F. It was after this experience, after a year had gone by, that still visions of our duels would return again and again to me, ideas of things I didn’t say, but should have said, tormenting me, only then did I finally grow the ears to hear what Nietzsche was writing about. I had experience to bring to the text, and thereby could now extrapolate and actually experience the results of the wisdom stored therein. I sleep like a baby.
Meh. I don’t really feel like continuing this. It’s getting ugly.
yes! The Underground Man! thank you!
you’ve clearly experienced first hand what these men were talking about, which happens to be the only way one could really understand what they’re talking about
and i know too what you mean about reading something, say of N, and have it basically fall flat on deaf ears the first time around, even a second or third, only to go back a year later and read it again, and suddenly it makes all the sense in the world - his antipathy toward pity was one of those things that escaped me for some time, and only later did it finally dawn on me what he meant, after i had experienced what he meant
and cool name btw - i just read Notes for the first time very recently 
A very intriguing question… Even beyond the argument of defining depth.
Anyway, I’d say Nietzsche.
What’s depth?
In terms of layers upon layers, of depth into which one can mine, as a progressive thing and a spur… Nietzsche. Powerful, challenging stuff that makes you think and think and when you think you’ve thought enough, turns what you’ve come to on its head and makes you think some more.
In terms of depth of saturation, of a philosophy that soaks your (my) worldview and gives you a new view, new tools; comprehensiveness… I’d go for Wittgenstein (part 2, the W. of Philosophical Investigations). But in some senses of depth, he is the most superficial, he bleaches out and levels depth.
I do agree with what Gib said below this…that was profoundly insightful of you Wonderer =D> …that is not to say that i am surprised by your insightfulness. still waters do indeed run deep. 