Instead of talking about reality directly and speaking plain truths that everyone can understand, philosophers, like the good little academics they usually are, like to make things more confusing by creating unnecessary terms and over-labeling everything. Mostly you just get a lot of ‘isms’ being thrown around and this gives the false impression that philosophizing (truth-love) is occurring.
You should realize that none of those words is necessary. You can talk about reality directly without using any of those ‘isms’. Loving truth as such and for its own sake belies this kind of silly nonsense which seems to be a big reason why there are so few good philosophers anywhere, but a whole plethora of idiotic and bad ones.
I wonder if they also fall in love with their own fancy words and use them as a way to elevate their status? It could be an ego thing. But I think mostly its little more than intellectual failure, a lack of intelligence and lack of an honest will to truth that would be sufficient to make one realize the meaningless things one is really doing instead of what philosophy is supposed to do: pursue the truth at all costs.
Philosophy vs. labelism. There’s a new ‘ism’ for them to ponder, ha. Oh the irony.
They are short cuts for people who talk about philosophy a lot. One philosopher talking to another they share a common language and they can use single words instead of longer explanations. Surgeons could say could you put that metal squeezy thing on the red round thingy coming out of that shiny red organ to the left, but hey they can cut down all that to three words and be sure it’ll go home.
Experts develop short cuts, so they don’t have to explain a large amount of things whenever they are talking about something that comes up with some regularity in their field. In philosophy forums you generally don’t usually need that, since many people don’t have those short cuts and the others realize many people won’t recognize them.
Maybe the first time your with your beloved you might babble on about the physical effects and mental effects of gazing at them. But pretty soon just saying I love you does the trick. I mean even love is a term batching a whole bunch of information.
You actually believe in “talking about reality directly and speaking plain truths that everyone can understand”, and “[l]oving truth as such and for its own sake”! The pure mind loving the True and the Beautiful and the Good in itself…
“Bukharin’s words cannot touch the souls of intellectuals bent upon conscious or unconscious obfuscation of the nihilism informing their liberalism.
To grasp the deep need for this obfuscation, one must first comprehend nihilism’s meaning. Like most technical philosophic jargon, ‘nihilism’ is a pretentious way of saying something simple, an effort to flee the horror in that simplicity. Nihilism means ‘nothing’ or ‘nothingness.’ It teaches that nothing --and only nothing! – is real or true. Hereafter I use words such as ‘nothing,’ ‘nothingness,’ ‘emptiness’ or ‘void’ instead of ‘nihilism.’ This avoids the window-dressing of scholarly jargon designed to hide reality’s nothingness.
[…]
Nothing is easier to perceive than reality’s emptiness. Genuine philosophy or science is the realization that nothing, no divine or natural order, endows anything with a non-arbitrary being, an identity not subject to radical change at any moment. There is nothing in (or behind or above) things to make them more than empty experiences, impressions as Hume called them. Reality and everything in it is nothing but empty impressions, bigotries, dreams whose dreamer is himself a dream.” (Harry Neumann, “What is Bigotry? A Note on Academic and Un-Academic Philosophers”, in Liberalism, pages 14-15.)
Is it that easy to just “talk about reality directly”? When we live in a world where people have such wildly different intuitions about what reality is like?
I think you should use everyday words instead of ‘intuition’. Also I don’t like philosophy in the title of the thread and this forum Why these Greek words coming through Latin, French and Middle English? The forum should be called I Love Talking about Stuff I Thought of and Other People Thought of While Trying to Be Smart.
That’s a nice excuse of a rationalization which ignores entirely the meaning of what I already wrote here, but don’t despair, I saw it coming a mile away as it were.
Critique academic ‘culture’ and all the predictable bobble-heads emerge in a scathing highly offended fervor. Don’t think I haven’t already accounted for as much.
And yet the principle point remains, which you’ve entirely missed. Forgive me for not being surprised.
Literally no idea what any of that was supposed to mean but thanks for playing. At least the other guy’s insanity has some actual meaning to it, albeit one irrelevant to this particular topic.
Yes it is easy. If you doubt this then you might just try it, and see.
Imagine not even being able to speak clearly and directly about the reality which is your own experience. That seems a special madness reserved only for schizophrenics or… academics.
About 2500 years ago, there was a guy named Plato who taught that one could purify one’s mind (“emerge from the cave”, he called it) and directly experience reality… He also taught that the True (reality), the Beautiful and the Good (the lovable) were one. You clearly have a very strong Platonic streak.
As for the other guy: his meaning is very relevant to this particular topic, and he’s not insane, but this (whether he’s insane or not) is in fact irrelevant: for his meaning is beyond, it precedes, distinctions like sane/insane…
The “scathing highly offended fervor” is entirely yours. You’re intoxicated with your “masculinity”, although you try to play it “cool” by availing yourself of the lowest form of wit.
Such intoxication is what drives people insane—if not oneself, then at least one’s friends…
If it’s only the reality which is one’s own experience, how do you know whether anyone else is able to speak clearly and directly about it or not? After all, then it’s only about speaking clearly and directly about it to oneself…
Well, that would require some “one”—a God, say—to spectate through all those perspectives. But there probably is no such cumulative Subject, but many discrete subjects, and the one reality is the rational but not empirical sum of all those subjects.
Yes, yes, you are special and unique… And I suppose the oneness may be considered an intelligible object, the object of an intelligizing subject—in other words, a rational object, not an empirical one, like I said before. This, however, is a crucial distinction: basically, the distinction between philosophy (skepticism) and religion (dogmatism).
You spoke of the objectivity of the oneness of all subjective perspectivisms, which culminate(?) to equal the “one” true reality. So the object I’m talking about is the oneness of all subjective perspectivisms, their culmination(?) which equals the “one” true reality; or, simply put, it’s the “oneness” of the true reality. And I’m saying that’s only an object of intellection, not of experience…
The pure mind loving the True and the Beautiful and the Good in itself…