The only proper method consists of performing a phenomenological reduction on every concept in order to discover its true and complete meaning. This isolates the concept absolutely. Once this has been done and a definition has been produced (not produced “in language” but produced “in and as the idea itself”) the concept is then subjected to a phenomenological expansion-explosion upwards and outwards in order to see precisely how and where and why and when it connects (in terms of its proper meaning) to other concepts.
This method will eventually produce the topographic map of the universe of ideas, or “pure meaning”. Plato’s “Ideality”-sphere, basically. This is an objectively ocurring space. It is discovered, not created. It is as real and as discoverable in hard ‘scientific’ terms as are physical continents on the earth.
Intelligent people dialogue and debate in order to add new truths to their mental map of the universe of ideas or to remove errors from it. To refine it and make it more precise and complete.
Thinking occurs only after the fact of this map’s existence to and for your own mentality and always upon it, namely the topographic complexity inherent to the map (it is properly a 3D construct) is what produces, when the map is being “read” by your mind, what we call our ideas or our thoughts. But first the basic layer of meaning must exist and it must exist to a quite large extent in order for any thinking to get off the ground. This is the insight that is merely intuited but then fatally butchered by the likes of logical positivists, deconstructionists and post-modernists. They sense the internal split in mentality with respect to its relationship to its own concepts and meanings but they lack the language or ability to articulate the reality of this relationship properly, hence they spin off into various forms of reality-denying madness.
Existentialism is not even philosophy but rather is another brand of this same type of madness. Existentialism in terms of method (Nietzsche simps being a prime example of this) is pathologically psychological and radically reductively self-focused and therefore finds its terminus, indeed the end-point of all of its lines of thinking and the telos of all of its ideas and grand philosophical constructions, located within oneself rather than located in the truth. This is why existentialism is such potent self-therapy and why it feels so good. It is literally a type of drug. It distorts, borrows, obfuscates and redirects flows of meaning (imagine instead of flows of dopamine you have metaphysical flows of literal meaning) in order to “pump up” the self in ways that it otherwise has not earned with respect to the true extant conditions in reality to which it is in fact subject. In fact it lacks the truth-sensitivity and accuracy of meaning to think about and talk about what it pretends to think about and talk about.
And not only is it the case that it is being subject to such broader conditions and truths (as truths) but that it is always-already having been constructed itself, made in and as itself across past, present and future entirely in terms of and as a consequence of these very same truth-conditions. Therefore it becomes an inversion, a ghost or more like a shadow as it comes more and more to be defined precisely by what it lacks with respect to that into which it has actually in reality already entered into relation. Therefore also the cost of existential philosophy is going to be the same as the cost of a drug-binge, namely a huge helping of self-denialism turned cancerously into a deeply felt need as denial becomes associated with your own ego and sense of yourself, as well as therefore a corresponding inability to access and understand the truth.
Drugs = fantasy escape. Can be nice for a while, so long as you know what it is and what it isn’t. I personally use alcohol to regulate my own emotions and excesses of meaning. But anyone who tells you drugs have something to do with philosophy or give some kind of special insight into the truth are liars or are deeply lost in their own drug-addled fantasies.
Proper method will disclose sufficient meaning by delimiting the concept-spaces to what they actually are in reality. Only after your mind has learned to deal with sufficiencies will it be able to begin the task of philosophizing without also producing its own gross errors (errors that become mixed up in the philosophical attempts themselves, often integrated within that so it would be nearly impossible to separate them out again. When this happens philosophy becomes little more than finding new ways every day of coping with one’s own self-fractured existence. Like an addict who wakes up every day needing to know where his next hit will come from).
My primary impression of Philosophy has always been to destroy absolutely everything with Doubt, Disbelief, Deconstructionism, Skepticism, etc. and then presume that whatever leftover must be The Truth, a trial by fire methodology of arriving at truth. This is very effective, at first, as illogic, contradictions, and mountains of hypocrisy begin to pile-up in every individual and ideology across history. There is no perfect ideology, perfect logic, perfect person, etc. Therefore, Philosophy keeps ‘winning’ as the strongest modes of Faith and Science are proven wrong, over, and over, and over again. All it takes is enough time/patience, and intellect, a constant pressure against the world’s belief systems.
But as I matured, I gained belief that Philosophy must be competent at both creating and destroying. It is not enough to tear everybody else’s worldview down or apart; you must replace them with your own. In this way, Philosophy represent a progression of human wisdom over time, as a history of ideologies that are evolving, memetically as they do genetically. Life becomes more Sophisticated, when it advances.
The most common and perhaps ancient interpretation of gaining wisdom, hence philosophical insight, knowledge, and power, is the ability for an evolved and sensitive Eye to turn itself directly at the Sun. Light is unbearable and blinding. It will pain your mind with sensory overload. If you stare too long, then your retinas will burn away into permanent blindness and darkness. Such is tolerance to Truth, Reality, and Existence. You must turn your mind’s eye to this; and your intellect is your resistance that gauges your ability to successfully navigate. No two minds are equal; barely are any remotely alike. Thus everybody has several degrees magnitude of different ‘topologies’ of reality. Sometimes they can mesh together, usually not. Usually it is the dimwitted who latch-onto the guidance of superior minds, because they sense in themselves a reasonable lack of confidence. Some souls make better Captains than others. A minority of minds are suited to sail a ship.
Few men lead to anything great in life, let alone a great Philosophy.
Existentialism connects back to the trial by fire method of Philosophy, of destroying everything and seeing what remains. In the case of Existentialism, this leads to Atomic Theory, and the hypothesis of atomic and sub-atomic, particulate physical structures of existence. There must be Particles. These are ‘things’. These are the things of the mind, the bases for conceptual understanding. These are known through chemistry as the Elements and their compounds. This is Alchemical, what was once traditional form of ‘magic’. Science is magic, for the nitwits and dimwits. Higher intelligences perceive “forces” or “patterns” in Nature, which are then manipulated by that person, or a large team of scientists, to produce powerful effects. This is the basis of Technology and Empiricism/Measurement.
The primary focus of Existentialism is “how must a thing exist?”, which quickly descends into Scientific rigor (Physics).
Much Philosophy hangup gets caught on the ‘subjective/objective’ nature of existence, which is where typical quandaries can be side-stepped. Usually, it doesn’t matter if a thing is “subjective or objective”, but instead how a particle might exist physically, then is a matter of Science, taken from Philosophy.
Humanity has a deep and profound Need for “The Truth”. Most of humanity hands their personal autonomy, responsibility, and authority, straight up to “Experts”, classically these are the Scientists, Mystics, Priests, Shaman, Politicians, God, King, whatever institution you prefer to serve or refer to. Plato’s Aristocracy refers to a type of mankind that does not hand-up such authority, but keeps it, and demands more than all else. YOU are responsible for yourself. Therefore you cannot depend upon others’ pursuit for Truth. Certainly you can follow another; you can agree with another. But you must fully understand the method, rationale, and the reason exactly why & how another came to a particular truth, before you ‘take’ it as your own. It is not your own, when you followed somebody else.
A hiker on a dangerous trail should not blame those who came before, or those who carved the trail, for his own danger.
Science is the trail of choice; most people flock to the trails carved by Scientists as “most reliable” by the most amount of people to proceed. I liken Philosophy as the original trailblazers, who are usually long forgotten. These trails are soft and not entrenched, until years/decades/centuries later.
Drugs are Pharmakon: φάρμακον, Medicine when used for disease, Poison when used for leisure.
I’ve stayed away in my life. They steal the mind of the midwit, a childish distraction, for reality & existence are far more profound to the philosophical mind than the hypnotic effects of chemicals.
A Philosophical mind must not risk being poisoned, therefore tainted, by such a shallow (hedonistic) ambition.
The problem with this is that it assumes you are already capable of knowing enough truth that you could properly know what to dismiss/deconstruct/disbelieve before you have even enacted that very process itself, which process is what is supposedly going to give you the truths you would need to be able to know how to do that. So it can be a contradiction.
This is a very common error. People accept or reject things too quickly, without having the basis for being able to accurately make those judgments yet. And then these errors go on to prevent them from being able to acquire that needed truth basis, so they often double down on the errors and spin off into weird unrealities.
Descartes was dumb like this. He and Hume and the rest of their ilk push radical doubt and skepticism, which is self-defeating and self-contradictive. And in the end doesn’t produce anything useful, interesting or meaningful anyway. Juts a dumbed-down mind scraping along the bottom of the barrel as it limps along its journey of nihilism, looking to borrow anything that might make it feel smart for a moment or two.
Yes, but only on the individual level, and perhaps MAYBE on the highest possible group level. Philosophy is also a colossal failure. It has not led humanity into a better world, what it has done is create endless illusions and then led humans into that illusory fantasy world where they become SUBJECTS (in your sense of the word) to various modes of anti-human tyranny.
What happens when humans enact contradictions in themselves and their institutions of the world, and never bother to remove these? They themselves and their world gradually become more and more INHUMAN. Because the direct contrast of human is inhuman, literally speaking. And yes of course you need to work to purge errors from your ideas and logical thought processes, also from your feelings and impulse reactions. That’s a given, and something most people don’t bother doing INCLUDING the radical skeptic types. These crypto-nihilists are probably the least interested of anyone in actually taking a look at their claims and trying to find errors in them. They are basically ideologues. This is apparent once you free yourself from their dogmatical silly little systems.
Yes but again only at the individual level and only very rarely. For most people, what might be called their philosophy (this goes for academics and “professionals” as well as armchair ILP members or the average joe on the street) is nothing but an expression of their own personal entropic decaying at the behest of time and their own self-laziness and need to be lulled to sleep by pleasing illusions. Maybe 1 out of 10,000 people is able to use philosophy in a proper way. Probably a lot less than that.
If you think philosophy at the general level of the public, of the average person over time, is somehow operating a kind of natural selection making things better or making people more intelligent over time, think again. Evolution has no preference for intellect or stupidity, it will use either one equally depending on the context in which selection is occurring. As for philosophy itself, as properly being not only a truth process but THE truth process, yes it does have a preference for intellect but you also need to recognize that what is called philosophy today and in the world rarely is. The name ‘philosophy’ is appropriated by those who wish to puff themselves up, people like Zizek and Jordan Peterson for example or people like the average college professor in a Phil department.
Philosophy itself in actually very very rare. So it would be strange to give it credit for how the world moves over time. It is far from being anything like a major player in humanity’s development over time, and in fact it is precisely the ABSENCE of philosophy that is responsible for so much that does occur in that developmental history. But it’s chicken or egg… are humans infantile because they lack any concern for true philosophy, or do they lack any concern for true philosophy because they are infantile? Obviously it’s both.
I mean sure, that’s maybe an apt analogy in some ways. But I prefer to speak directly about things and not rely on stand-ins. Truth-seeking is not entirely like an eye turning to the sun. The analogy is imperfect, and its imperfections are not thought out, so why bother using the analogy at all? It is a shortcut to thinking, one that is used because it makes one feel more profound than one has earned based on what they are actually saying. Analogies are often employed for precisely this reason (not saying that’s what you are doing, I think you are being sincere here).
The problem here is that your mind’s eye is already made of the truth, of experiences that are already imbued with reality and substance and meaning and you are always already aware of at least some of this expanse of reality-substantial meaning. So the eye “already knows itself” and also needs to “turn to itself”, to make of itself an object of perception. But yes I do get the point you are making.
Well nothing is equal except if we define our terms, the metric of comparison and valuation we want to use. Obviously a human mind contains so many possible vectors for comparative valuation that it would be absurd to claim any two minds were equal in total. But they could perhaps be more or less equal in limited contexts, such as with regard to certain skill-sets or ideas or more specifically mentally-occurring phenomena (for example how similar are different peoples’ experiences of things like strong feelings? Does everyone feel pain or love or anger or guilt or jealousy in the same way? Probably not, yet we are not sure exactly how different their experiences are. Maybe they are more similar than (we would like to) think).
I have heard this idea before, that two people are far more dissimilar internally/mentally than they are similar, and I have a very hard time seeing how this could be the case. We are build with very similar structure, our DNA is basically 99.999% the same between any two humans. This means our physiology and the ways our brains are wired are very similar too. And while we have different levels of innate ability like intelligence or curiosity or creativity these exist on a spectrum that is also filled in by experience, which many people have similar experiences or at least similar enough to be able to talk about it with one another. The very fact that people are able to talk to one another and form some kind of common understanding seems to mean that we are not more dissimilar than similar, at least in some ways.
Obviously if you want to talk about specific metrics then yeah, we can be very different. Pick a context of evaluation: mathematical skill, basketball skill, carpentry skill, painting skill, coding skill, novel-writing skill, etc. and people will be very different. But that is only along that one limited dimension. Who is to say such delimited continuums of achievement or knowledge are where the bulk of “what it means to be a human” lies? Well maybe they are, in total at least. That’s an interesting thing to consider.
Usually it is the dim-witted who attack and reject the guidance of superior minds, and must be tricked into doing what their “superiors” want them to do. If an averagely dumb person is made aware that someone else is more intelligent than they are usually this makes them react in anger. The stupid always wish to destroy the intelligent. So the intelligent eventually come to comprise two groups: those who largely remove themselves from contact and influence on idiots, and those who become malevolently interested in manipulating and abusing the idiots for their own personal gain.
True.
Maybe that is true, I wouldn’t know how to make such a determination except that when it comes to philosophy yes of course you are correct. But life itself, a “great life” can be defined in many different ways, not all of them needing to contain some kind of mastery of philosophy.
At its best, yes it does. More commonly or at its worst, no it isn’t really concerned with purging errors in fire and is more interested in utilizing its own narcissism to buttress itself against its own nihilism, and making sure to do this in ways that keep the illusion going that it is doing something like truth-seeking for its own sake.
I fail to see the innate connection between existentialism and empirical science, or between it and modeling things on atoms/particles.
I wish.
More like, as Nietzsche said of free will, this is a need for the FEELING of knowing the truth, rather than for truth itself.
Ideas are owned by no one. To think that truths or results or intellectual methods of reason are somehow belonging to certain people is absurd. These are all things that we discover as we are collectively and individually mapping the universe of ideas. If you learn of a new idea or truth from someone else, great. You don’t “owe” them anything except maybe to thank them for their contribution to your own understanding. But certainly they do not own whatever idea or insight it was. That would be a form of self-slavery, and anyone pushing such an idea would almost certainly be interested in accumulating a class of slaves around themselves. Not something an authentic truth-seeker would be interested in, in part because of what a burden on one’s truth-seeking it would be to have a bunch of dumb manipulated sycophants around you begging for you to use/abuse them.
I’m not big on analogies and metaphors, so I’m just going to leave this as it is.
I don’t speak Greek and I don’t pretend to speak Greek in order to give myself an air of superiority (not saying that’s what you are necessarily doing, I don’t really know).
I am not referring to all pharma drugs or medicines. I am talking very specifically about drugs that do what I described. Drugs that get you high or warp your perceptions, basically. Obviously some medicines are pretty important and aren’t drugs in the sense that I mentioned it.
Exactly. I see people smoking weed for example and I’m like, ok dude you just keep making yourself lazier and stupider, that’s none of my business.
That’s a good observation. There is an A Priori (from the start) truth-decision compulsion in the brain, that philosophy must compensate for. And what is this decision-process? A person interprets somethings as true, others as false. If such interpretation is too divorced or incongruent with Reality, then organisms are unfit and most certainly die, after a severity of errors occur. This process is something as simple as misjudging distance and speed of an object, like a car driving toward you on the road. Varmints and rodents often get run over and killed. People can make this same truth-decision error. A person thinks a car is far enough away to cross, and can also be killed.
So what can you say about this truth-decision process? How does an individual organism, a brain, decide as to the truth of things? How do you interpret that?
I disagree, Sciences were originally Philosophy (Empiricism, Natural Law), and so constitute the historical motivation force of progress to today’s average standard-of-living in the West. Most of daily life has improved, for the most amount of people. Looking at previous centuries of histories, it’s safe to assert now, that the 20th and 21st Century have led to an objectively ‘better’ world, in food, in medicine, in travel, in technology, in morality, in justice, in politics, in everything.
Are things still bad? Still tyrannical governments at play? Of course, nothing will be perfect, but things do get better via evolution.
The degree of Efficiency has improved so starkly, exponentially, that a (real) Philosopher today can speak to millions and billions of people over the internet directly. It’s as simple as using this forum. So we can assume that Philosophy today, is as popular as Philosophy in previous eras, or ancient Athens, millenniums ago. Philosophy is not popular among the Common, because there is a high quotient of IQ required to enjoy, understand, and appreciate philosophical ideas, inquiries, investigations, and the like. Thus Philosophy is more popular among the very intelligent. These types want to watch and hear a great debate against skilled logicians, about matters of utmost importance. This is the rarity. People will readily accept and consume expositions from lesser intellects, rhetoricians, academics, who “play at” philosophy, without themselves doing or being philosophers.
Philosophy is something very different, if taken seriously, and you not only ‘do’ philosophy, be ‘become’ a philosopher.
I use the Sun analogy because it is most readily understood when it comes to truth-decisions and judgments. Is there light, or not? This is a simple truth-statement, versus “What do you see?” which is far more complex. There needs to be some basis and criterion for subjective and objective truth-statements.
.
Basically Descartes’ Cartesian coordinate plane, mathematical plotting system, along with Leibniz’ Monadology, were core principles, based on Existentialism and Materialism, that led to development of Atomic Theory, due to how their philosophies and works posited the existence of a “God-particle”, a particulate matter so small that it must ‘fill’ any and everything. It was from those philosophical theories and ideals, that science proceeded and Atomic Theory posited thereafter.
If ideas are owned by no one, then you wouldn’t be able to distinguish from me writing my words, versus you writing your words, yes?
It’s pitiful watching potentially intelligent young men waste their brains on addictions, especially to pot.
Because it is based in pathological inauthenticity with regard to how it replaces truth with self as the primary object of inquiry and interest. Existentialism is “self-ism”. This is the reason for its deep ties to psychology and psychiatry as well as various types of insane subjectivism like skepticism, empiricism or postmodernism for instance. Once you view existentialism from the proper perspective it is clearly an anti-philosophy, probably designed to trap people there so they go no further into truth-seeking.
Name an existentialist who isn’t depressed, narcissistic, egotistical, suicidal, self-absorbed, vain or who doesn’t talk about themselves all the time and relate all of their ideas to something about “the psyche” or “nature”. Psyche is just a naturalized version of self-philosophizing similar to how Nietzsche tried to naturalize everything including metaphysics under the anti-metaphysical notion “will to power”. I mean these people have no shame, they don’t need shame because for the most part they’re ignorant about what they’re actually all about. They do it because they love how it makes the feel.
Just like you said, there is an innate sort of desire or need to make decisions, to “know” things. Probably because it makes people feel good and causes their worldview to become more stable. Also because we should be making truth-statements, but we should be making correct ones. Not just acting it out impulsively in every direction for its own sake. I notice funny examples of this in other people, when they are caught at the limits of their knowledge and they realize it. Liberals tend to kick the impulse into overdrive and double down, whereas conservatives tend to stop and tacitly make fun of themselves for not knowing things that they already do know. Conservatives love to admit there are things they don’t know, they use this as a badge of pride to virtue signal their supposed ignorance about things, whereas when it comes to liberals I have never met one who was honestly able to simply say “hm, I guess I don’t know”. They are both know-it-alls but this manifests differently. Either by an impulse to dissolve the boundaries between self and other or to fortify those boundaries, both responses are defensive and dishonest because the truth is the main casualty. It makes it funny but also really annoying to talk to these people.
I would say the impulse/need to make decisions or truth judgments, yes or no beliefs, is like an infantile version of the instinct of philosophy itself. The instinct of philosophy is nothing more than the love of truth as such and for its own sake. Period. No more and no less. Everything else falls away or is limited-contextualized with regard to this single principle, I shouldn’t even call it an instinct. It is more like a high-level Dasein that needs to be cultivated over time. At first it is the brash and impulsive need to make truth-claims, then it is the self-love and emotionalism of the existentialist, and eventually it can become the authentic pursuit of truth itself.
We are far from any kind of decent will behind science anymore. This is a pendulum swing, first it peaked in the industrial revolution with the absolutism about science for its own sake, now it has swung over clear into the opposite side of “what are the consequences/telos of what science is and should be doing?” The non-scientific political control over science is still peaking and we are nowhere near the end point of this swing in the pendulum, in fact I think we are probably moving into a new type of regressive gnosticism where things are unknown, mystified and we must simply trust the “experts” or the “authority” even and especially when things don’t make any sense. Most of science has already sold itself out to political and financial concerns anyway, so this transition isn’t difficult. It doesn’t represent any kind of great fall.
And in fact modern life is so easy and convenient that it is a bad thing. Most people are fat, lazy, drugged, unhealthy physically and mentally, not even counting the fact that since there is almost no purifying Darwinian selection in human first world societies we have the gradual build-up of gene mutations that remain unpurged and are causing lots of problems. Mouse utopia moments. So throw that on top of all the political manipulations and psyops going on along with the pendulum swing, and I suppose for most people the best in life they can hope for is to come home from a long day at work and relax on the couch with Netflix and a beer. This is “the good life” by modern standards. Yet what do you think that life looks like if evaluated from a philosophical standard? What sort of future is entailed by this? And it isn’t as if modern science is coming up with radical new amazing inventions like it used to, in fact this is tracked over time by people who measure the rate of genius scientific innovation, and it has been declining since the late 1800s just like our overall IQ has been declining since then. Most capital and energy and attention is not put into making breakthrough amazing new discoveries and inventions (except maybe in secret places like darpa where it is put to nefarious uses) but is squandered in the “attention economy” as momentary consumption and absorbed by the great Moloch of marketing, social media and fake “news”.
And yet what has been the result of giving every human on earth their own free printing press with a global reach? You think this has furthered philosophy and learning in the populace? Lol, no. Quite the opposite. Modern tech does not give you the agora, it gives you tik tok. And most people are far dumber and more distracted now than ever before, even if there is still a bit of Flynn effect propping things up here or there.
No, certainly not. I mean yeah in the past it was still true most people didn’t care about reading or discussing philosophy, yet the average Victorian person’s vocabulary was significantly broader and more complex than our own, meaning they were able to speak of things in ways we cannot, even speak of things we can’t even speak of. Nuances and intricacies in ideas, theories, feelings, etc. Try reading books from 100 years ago or older, modern people don’t know what half the words mean. Then watch Idiocracy the movie and see how much the modern world is now exactly like what is depicted in that movie.
Also, daily reminder that most people took untested, useless, dangerous and experimental toxic gene therapy because the tv told them to. Just saying. Modern people are pretty retarded.
I mean it doesn’t really matter because we can always pick some group historically to compare ourselves against in various ways and come out ahead or behind, I don’t see much point in doing that unless it is really directly relevant to some question we have or an important point we need to understand. For me this importance relates to the decline in our intelligence over the last 150 or so years and the impact this is having on everything around us. But even that is only one small piece of the whole picture.
Yes. And yes.
Yes I agree. Philosophy is a most amazing thing. Because it is all things all together and all at once. It is the enacting of truth as an impulse, a movement, a process and a growth in being. The actualizing of truth itself, that is what we are talking about here. Logically this would and does include quite literally ‘everything’.
Sure.
Sure, and yet modern ‘science’ has abandoned all that in favor of things like fields and non-particle interactions. Particle is just a very basic concept of “this thing here separate from other things”, in a way it doesn’t get more conceptually basic than that. I agree that existentialism tends toward materialism because of how it inverts metaphysics and because it has no proper phenomenological method of eidetic reduction-to-meaning of the terms it employs. This could lead to atomism as a world view, but again that is empiricism and science and not really philosophy. It’s one thing to for a basic theory “some stuff acts like a little ball, other stuff acts like a diffuse cloud” but that simple philosophical statement is different from what empirical science actually is and does, much less from how that empirical science in its gross materialism and reductionism has basically abandoned philosophy entirely.
No. I can look at trees in the forest and know they are not owned by anyone, yet I can still distinguish one unowned tree from another. I can distinguish words coming from you as different from words coming from me, and I can understand that your mind contains a lot of ideas that my mind doesn’t, or a lot of different perspectives on more or less common ideas or concepts where I don’t have those same perspectives. We negotiate our respective worldviews through language, that doesn’t mean any of the ideas or truth-claims themselves need to be considered “owned”. It is silly to think of owning an idea. Maybe in terms of intellectual property patenting, ok. But that’s not what philosophy is doing, and there is no metaphysical patent office in the universe of ideas.
Says me as I drink most of a 750 in one night, haha. But seriously, yes. I used to smoke pot, it’s very relaxing and kinda fun. But I have seen it make people dumb and lazy, and I don’t do it anymore because my mind is good enough as it is. Alcohol doesn’t affect my mind, it affects my emotions. Well ok it affects my mind while I am intoxicated, but I still retain the control and perspective enough to see how this is occurring and not do dumb things like drive my car around.
Plato’s ideals are real?
This is how you establish trth…not using your senses?
How do you formulate an idea without using your senses?
Phenomenological expansion?
You expand it in your mind.
How do you establish meaning?
Do you pull it out of your arse, where the platonic ideological sphere is stuck?
You live in your head, don’t ya?
A mental map, referring to other mental maps…verified and validated idealistically.
Without using your senses…that would make you a “materialist”…but using your inner senses.
You feel the truth…then you write gibberish using words referring to nothing but the map in your head.
You are in the Platonic cave.
And reading it backwards, philosophy must have gone and died, follllowing retirement of the gods to Wallhala, but, there is some sense in supposing it was birthed/born for some purpose, other then go through the whole painful process for ever and ever.
Can we as men follow that trail either way and distgustver some thing behind this game that appears to divide from a single crop in the bottom of a nowhere ocean in some lost by now galaxy in some insurmountable world ?
Man was dazzled by the sun…his skin scorched by the heat, and now he crawls back into the shadowy cave - that mental womb of his intellectual youth, refusing to come out again.
As long as the cave is guarded and the fires inside stocked, he can spend the rest of his day looking at his own shadow dancing on tis surfaces.
Yes, but there is no fire in the lowest 7 th part of the cave and that’s probably worse than the blazing oven one level up because from there a glimmer may offer some respit for ascent.
That’s not been my experience in life. For me, truth-decisions arise from anxiety/fear/doubt, and are suspended there indefinitely (cognitive dissonance), until applied directly to reality. I can believe things are true, but belief does not make them True. Truth is an interaction/synthesis between subject/object or subject/reality.
Merging pleasure with Truth, means that you have already fallen into a trap of Confirmation Bias (Illogic): Irrationality, Pathology (Appeal to Emotion).
Knowing things only ever makes things less stable. Philosophy requires stability, it does not ever afford it. What offers stability is another very different evolutionary mechanism, which is obedience.
10 years ago, most people didn’t really care much about knowing much. Now everybody is a savant genius. Is it likelier that humanity suddenly became illuminated, or that a directive was passed down?
As with the Industrial Revolution, the Technology Revolution of Computation has raised the boats of the masses only slightly.
But the extremes, which are unlimited, are exponential. So the savant-geniuses themselves, yes, have accelerated.
As mentioned, now a Philosopher has access to billions of people in seconds. The next question to ask is, why are the masses so slow to adapt, why are the Midwits of Humanity so resistant to change?