I am caught in an eternal strife between one thing and another. I like the position of not being locked into one “correct” way, having the ability to pivot. I too believe to be superiour to other people. I do however not think of my ideas as fully formed perfections. I dont quite yet know if you do think that way, but just pointing it out.
What wonders can or can’t a single individual achieve?
Theres just so much, but I’ll boill myself down to us prioritizing different things. I am advocating for a certain needed level of chaos, for the system to be able to be shook and subsequently changed, preferably by those who will improve the lives of all. While you, I think, try to protect each and every valuable ally and even extend your grace to your opponents. You value stability, even in the interim period, and prefer a slow, methodical way to get through change by using the proven systems. I however believe that these proven systems may need to be looked at regularely, maybe taken out a bit, given a scrub, some new oil… and then be put back into place with sone nice words and a comfy blanky.
As for adventurism, or the more comertial form of adventourism, it really is just one of my more horrible idea-obsessions. I have several of these and discussing them is much more fun than not discussing them. I would rather like to do some once again, though I think it rather unlikely to get a good chance anyhow. And I think I am quite capable of evaluating the possible consequences to my actions. Or do you want to even forbid myself this capability? Surely not. Its more fun not thinking it through anyways.
Often when talking to certain people in my personal life, they seem to adhere to the concept of truth, you seem to invoke said concept too. What is truth, is it measurable? absolutely not. I have done many-a-thing and not a single once have I stumbled over the truth just next to some Roots in the forrest floor. Truth is something made up. I forget which philosopher I am badly paraphrasing: Truth/power is a sort of currency, the powerful use their truth to create more specific truths, bending the world to their will in a certain sense. Most of the thyme one subordinates oneself to said truths, just because denying it is more destructive than helpful. I’m sorry, I can’t seem to quite get the edge of his arguments again.
You personally seem to think that the material world holds the truth and that history can predict ones success or failure. You are not wrong, just to have said that, but you are also not right. There often is more than a Yes and a No in the world, so any “binary” approach to the “truth” will lead to “failure”. (So far I feel you and I are on a similar page) There however is also no ternary way of truths in this world. The Daoists call these the Daos, the ways of the world. Any finite number of ways of truth will inevitably reach an edge-case not fitting the previous models.
You surely have heard of Descartes saying “I think, therefore I am.” that is an acceptable baseline for most of philosphy, that at least ones mind must exist, because at least that is currently doing a thunk. However there are acceptable versions of the world way into either direction. One says that a stone falls down, when let go, so that is a fact. and thus it is true. another says there is no way for anything to even provably exist, and thus nothing can be true. Where on (or off) this spectrum you want to place yourself is actually not for me to judge (though it would interest me). An important Condition one can apply is the contradiction. When ones theory of truth calls for stones to always fall down, one can just remove the down. Out there in outer space, where gravity is weak, possibly cancelling itself through multiple mass-bodies, a let-go stone and the hand which has let it go will hover next to each other till near eternity. Thusly having disproven one extreme? On the other side where nothing is provable nothing becomes disprovable, thus losing any meaning and many dislike that. dunno why. As to my personal oppinion, I usually are near Descartes, until I am driven into a corner, where I will revel in the simplicity of the undisprovable corner of inexistance. And if the other person has a better grasp of such far out ideas, then I can always mimic those blessed souls not burdened by constant overthinking and go feed some cats and touch grass.
The discussions of this world truely are kept fun by the misunderstanding :) ~Paul Watzlawick said something similar
There cannot be a truth, and there cannot be an untruth. thinking someone is right or wrong just requires infinitly less energy than finding each and every instance they’re wrong. THAN FINDING EACH INSTANCE THE’RE RIGHT. Being truthful in ones statements is quite the easy feat, but expecting others to do the same will only lead to sadness, or is that a generalization integrated by a worldview of generations-old half-truths. Half-truths which crumble under the slightest scrutiny, under the most mere of merecats, the slightest of slight edge-cases. And as a result of merecat-induced sleepiness I am only able of thinking about sleep and merecats. Thus the truth has become irrelevant. Since it wouldnt be helpful, even if it existed.
Foregive my ramblings: any kind of truth can only be useful if another party has at least achieved a similar level of truth, all else is wasted. What can even be discribed, be helped by the truth? I cannot feed something with truth. I cannot heal. I cannot protect. I cannot do anything with a sufficiently pure truth. It would help ne to know which pill allieviates suffering, tough it wont help without knowledge of the underlying issue causing the pains, the possible negative co-effects with other pills, or longterm side-effects.
What ridiculous truths people have held on over the years, all in favour of the end-goal, abandoned by future generations, recognizing the futility of truth in face of other factors.
how many Self-Contradictions do I contain? How many do you? I can only ever ask questions, because there are no answers. I am so sorry.
Um I’m not someone who depends on institutions for change. I’m a revolutionary Marxist who wants to tear down the system of capitalism and the imperialist state, not some liberal.
So I can tell you’ve spent some time thinking about these problems of philosophy, which is great! But I’m afraid there are telltale signs of your unfamiliarity with these topics. Its okay, I’m also a great admirer of the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, both of which deal directly with the dialectical form of reason that I’ll try to describe here briefly as I can, though its a huge topic I’m still wrapping my mind around and actively learning. As such, I can recognize and hope that our “ways” are similar since you are asking many questions that I have asked and sought answers for. But you aren’t there yet and I’ll show you where you are tripping up.
You make this case that there is no objective truth, and on that we certainly agree. But where you are mistaken is the empiricist fallacy that because the subject, in this case truth, lacks empirical objectivity, it therefore lacks realness. This is the problem with Kantian dualism which is the main way that we assemble meaning out of our experience, since the industrial revolution in the modern era. It is too common for sophists like Sam Harris to point to a blurry objectivity and claim nonexistence, and also for people who are seeking education on this topic to buy into this ridiculous modern myth.
You see it is dualism that compulsively categorizes, evaluates, alienates objects so that our reality appears as an assemblage of discreet things interacting with one another. This particular ontology (which is the name for the problem you have solved by flushing it down the intellectual toilet like one of your shits, the word means “theory of being”) struggles to find real subjects. So unless you want to throw away all subjectivity, which by quoting Descartes you claim is the only provable subject, you can’t dispense with truth, because you rely on a version of it for your own arguments, except you make a strawman of mine due to the shallowness of your own understanding. So I’m sorry, there is truth and meaning even if its inconvenient for your ego. Idk if this works on other people but you’re barking up the wrong tree. The philosophy you describe is like a characature of a fictional villain supergenius, who upon revealing their master plan also revels their philosophical motive which is actually extremely dumb and shallow. It doesn’t matter how sinisterly you laugh, I ain’t buying it. You didn’t do the reading, I can tell dude.
The philosopher you were trying to quote about Truth/Power is Michel Foucault. Who is an interesting thinker! I’ve read Power/Knowledge and I’m reading history of sexuality.
Anyway, what if we have different ontologies? What if we use the same words but they have different meanings which create an epistemological crisis? Another failure of popular reasoning is the Greek idea that a logical contradiction is a sign of error. However, it has been mathematically proven (mathematics itself a theory of formal, if abstract, knowledge) that every logical system contains breaking contradictions, and any attempts to “fix” these contradictions leads only to new sets of contradictions (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.) Even formal arithmetic can he exploited cleverly in order to make an equation where 1 = 0. When I learned this, I thought much the way that you do because I was still locked into my dualist way of thinking that turns reality into objects. How can contradictions in every logical system and every ontology lead to any conclusion other than there is no objective truth?
And the answer is that objectivity is not all there is to reality, as you so thoroughly pointed out. The contradiction that you made in your theory of no truth can be rectified by uniting the subject and the object and understanding that instead of separating these things as the dualists do, that actually the subject and object are united in contradiction. Lao Tsu was the master at this, which is why i have hope for you.
As soon as beauty is known by the world as beautiful, it becomes ugly.
As soon as virtue is being known as something good, it becomes evil.
Therefore being and non-being give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy accomplish each other.
Long and short form each other.
High and low distinguish each other.
Sound and tone harmonize each other
Before and after follow each other as a sequence.
Realizing this, the master performs effortlessly according to the natural Way
You are finding the pieces of the puzzle but haven’t put them together quite yet, there are still missing pieces. But with intellectual work often these gaps are invisible to us until we have enough of the facts uncovered so that the limits of our knowledge stop appearing as the edges of reality and begin to appear as gaps in understanding. You not only don’t understand my ideas, you don’t understand what you think are your own ideas. That’s okay, it just means we have work to do.
The word for this kind of reasoning, this ontology, is dialectics, and it has a long history both in eastern religion but also esoteric hermeticism which influenced much of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel reforged dialectical reasoning and developed a theory of history that surpassed Kant’s dualist libertarianism. In the subsequent century Hegel scholars elaborated on Hegels theory of history and oneness, and began to fuse his dialectical reasoning with French materialism which was in vogue at the time but suffered from the same limitations of dualism which it had failed to surpass. Feuerbach managed to make a lot of extraordinary conclusions from this unity and coined the term dialectical materialism, but the master of dialectical materialism was certainly Karl Marx. However it was his collaborator Engels who penned the work Anti-Duhring which laid the foundation for future generations of dialectical materialists. In it he puts forward a few rules which I might describe for you but you can also look them up yourself, they are described in the first section of the book, on philosophy. If you want to know more I’d be happy to go into more detail. He’s a pretty digestible author, and I think you’ll like his seething disdain for the illusions and idealism of the ruling class. That is who we need to surpass, not each other, but them. Or maybe who we were yesterday, as rise and grind of a mentality as that is, nothing is static and everything, including our selves, is becoming something else. What it is that we become is a matter for free will and circumstances to decide.
I won’t make an exhaustive case for the efficacy and predictive power of this kind of analysis, for that I would encourage you to read Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, particularly the last two sections on dialectics and Historical Materialism. Without that shared basis on which to discuss we will likely talk past each other from this point on.
Its also easy to assert that I’m just saying that the form of logic that I like is the one that determines truth. That’s not it, but I do believe that it is possible to determine what is true and real from a particular logical system, only that certain systems are better than others for solving certain problems. We have a scientific method (which also has limits) for determining the efficacy of any methodology, and without relying on the truth and realness of its conclusions we couldn’t have the advanced society that we have. Here is where we differ. You still subscribe to idealism, which implies that our thoughts change our environment, but you’ve found the limits of idealism and its made you determine there is no truth. Materialism asserts that the environment affects our ideas, which seems self evident in one regard but is almost completely alien to our popular conceptions. You haven’t even begun to explore this, at least you’ve given no indication of it. This is where you might continue your journey. I would choose the intellectual tools I need to solve a particular problem, not claim the tools are worthless because it can’t solve this particular problem, or that the problem is unsolvable. If I’m looking at history I use a historical perspective, if looking at figures, mathematical; this is something you can do and have done, but because you haven’t sufficiently questioned the overarching ontology of our era (and all ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, consider this!) its led you to the negation of meaning. But instead of stopping your inquiry at the discovery of a contradiction, this is where we would start our inquiry, since the presence of a contradiction implies the presence of a dialectical opposite, such that our subject is merely a part of a system, a monistic whole, which modern logic utterly sucks at detecting even though it is apparent to anyone with sense abilities and a subjective mind to experience them.
I appreciate your comments, and apologize for any “intellectual arrogance” I don’t mean to be like patronizing, I’m just having a bit of fun. Bourdieu once wrote something like, when you express any strong opinion you make a clown out of yourself, and so that’s all I’m doing, a bit of clowning. However the assertion that I havent though as deeply as you have on this issue, or that I’m adhering to some orthodoxy that blinds me to the truth that there is no truth (lol) is perhaps the biggest clown of all.
There’s likely much you could school me on, but not this, at least, not yet! But I also believe that discussion is the medium through which much personal growth becomes possible, which is why I actually like to discuss this stuff, not to clown or debate but to grow.
I am caught in an eternal strife between one thing and another. I like the position of not being locked into one “correct” way, having the ability to pivot. I too believe to be superiour to other people. I do however not think of my ideas as fully formed perfections. I dont quite yet know if you do think that way, but just pointing it out.
What wonders can or can’t a single individual achieve?
Theres just so much, but I’ll boill myself down to us prioritizing different things. I am advocating for a certain needed level of chaos, for the system to be able to be shook and subsequently changed, preferably by those who will improve the lives of all. While you, I think, try to protect each and every valuable ally and even extend your grace to your opponents. You value stability, even in the interim period, and prefer a slow, methodical way to get through change by using the proven systems. I however believe that these proven systems may need to be looked at regularely, maybe taken out a bit, given a scrub, some new oil… and then be put back into place with sone nice words and a comfy blanky.
As for adventurism, or the more comertial form of adventourism, it really is just one of my more horrible idea-obsessions. I have several of these and discussing them is much more fun than not discussing them. I would rather like to do some once again, though I think it rather unlikely to get a good chance anyhow. And I think I am quite capable of evaluating the possible consequences to my actions. Or do you want to even forbid myself this capability? Surely not. Its more fun not thinking it through anyways.
Often when talking to certain people in my personal life, they seem to adhere to the concept of truth, you seem to invoke said concept too. What is truth, is it measurable? absolutely not. I have done many-a-thing and not a single once have I stumbled over the truth just next to some Roots in the forrest floor. Truth is something made up. I forget which philosopher I am badly paraphrasing: Truth/power is a sort of currency, the powerful use their truth to create more specific truths, bending the world to their will in a certain sense. Most of the thyme one subordinates oneself to said truths, just because denying it is more destructive than helpful. I’m sorry, I can’t seem to quite get the edge of his arguments again.
You personally seem to think that the material world holds the truth and that history can predict ones success or failure. You are not wrong, just to have said that, but you are also not right. There often is more than a Yes and a No in the world, so any “binary” approach to the “truth” will lead to “failure”. (So far I feel you and I are on a similar page) There however is also no ternary way of truths in this world. The Daoists call these the Daos, the ways of the world. Any finite number of ways of truth will inevitably reach an edge-case not fitting the previous models.
You surely have heard of Descartes saying “I think, therefore I am.” that is an acceptable baseline for most of philosphy, that at least ones mind must exist, because at least that is currently doing a thunk. However there are acceptable versions of the world way into either direction. One says that a stone falls down, when let go, so that is a fact. and thus it is true. another says there is no way for anything to even provably exist, and thus nothing can be true. Where on (or off) this spectrum you want to place yourself is actually not for me to judge (though it would interest me). An important Condition one can apply is the contradiction. When ones theory of truth calls for stones to always fall down, one can just remove the down. Out there in outer space, where gravity is weak, possibly cancelling itself through multiple mass-bodies, a let-go stone and the hand which has let it go will hover next to each other till near eternity. Thusly having disproven one extreme? On the other side where nothing is provable nothing becomes disprovable, thus losing any meaning and many dislike that. dunno why. As to my personal oppinion, I usually are near Descartes, until I am driven into a corner, where I will revel in the simplicity of the undisprovable corner of inexistance. And if the other person has a better grasp of such far out ideas, then I can always mimic those blessed souls not burdened by constant overthinking and go feed some cats and touch grass.
The discussions of this world truely are kept fun by the misunderstanding :) ~Paul Watzlawick said something similar
There cannot be a truth, and there cannot be an untruth. thinking someone is right or wrong just requires infinitly less energy than finding each and every instance they’re wrong. THAN FINDING EACH INSTANCE THE’RE RIGHT. Being truthful in ones statements is quite the easy feat, but expecting others to do the same will only lead to sadness, or is that a generalization integrated by a worldview of generations-old half-truths. Half-truths which crumble under the slightest scrutiny, under the most mere of merecats, the slightest of slight edge-cases. And as a result of merecat-induced sleepiness I am only able of thinking about sleep and merecats. Thus the truth has become irrelevant. Since it wouldnt be helpful, even if it existed.
Foregive my ramblings: any kind of truth can only be useful if another party has at least achieved a similar level of truth, all else is wasted. What can even be discribed, be helped by the truth? I cannot feed something with truth. I cannot heal. I cannot protect. I cannot do anything with a sufficiently pure truth. It would help ne to know which pill allieviates suffering, tough it wont help without knowledge of the underlying issue causing the pains, the possible negative co-effects with other pills, or longterm side-effects.
What ridiculous truths people have held on over the years, all in favour of the end-goal, abandoned by future generations, recognizing the futility of truth in face of other factors.
how many Self-Contradictions do I contain? How many do you? I can only ever ask questions, because there are no answers. I am so sorry.
Um I’m not someone who depends on institutions for change. I’m a revolutionary Marxist who wants to tear down the system of capitalism and the imperialist state, not some liberal.
So I can tell you’ve spent some time thinking about these problems of philosophy, which is great! But I’m afraid there are telltale signs of your unfamiliarity with these topics. Its okay, I’m also a great admirer of the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, both of which deal directly with the dialectical form of reason that I’ll try to describe here briefly as I can, though its a huge topic I’m still wrapping my mind around and actively learning. As such, I can recognize and hope that our “ways” are similar since you are asking many questions that I have asked and sought answers for. But you aren’t there yet and I’ll show you where you are tripping up.
You make this case that there is no objective truth, and on that we certainly agree. But where you are mistaken is the empiricist fallacy that because the subject, in this case truth, lacks empirical objectivity, it therefore lacks realness. This is the problem with Kantian dualism which is the main way that we assemble meaning out of our experience, since the industrial revolution in the modern era. It is too common for sophists like Sam Harris to point to a blurry objectivity and claim nonexistence, and also for people who are seeking education on this topic to buy into this ridiculous modern myth.
You see it is dualism that compulsively categorizes, evaluates, alienates objects so that our reality appears as an assemblage of discreet things interacting with one another. This particular ontology (which is the name for the problem you have solved by flushing it down the intellectual toilet like one of your shits, the word means “theory of being”) struggles to find real subjects. So unless you want to throw away all subjectivity, which by quoting Descartes you claim is the only provable subject, you can’t dispense with truth, because you rely on a version of it for your own arguments, except you make a strawman of mine due to the shallowness of your own understanding. So I’m sorry, there is truth and meaning even if its inconvenient for your ego. Idk if this works on other people but you’re barking up the wrong tree. The philosophy you describe is like a characature of a fictional villain supergenius, who upon revealing their master plan also revels their philosophical motive which is actually extremely dumb and shallow. It doesn’t matter how sinisterly you laugh, I ain’t buying it. You didn’t do the reading, I can tell dude.
The philosopher you were trying to quote about Truth/Power is Michel Foucault. Who is an interesting thinker! I’ve read Power/Knowledge and I’m reading history of sexuality.
Anyway, what if we have different ontologies? What if we use the same words but they have different meanings which create an epistemological crisis? Another failure of popular reasoning is the Greek idea that a logical contradiction is a sign of error. However, it has been mathematically proven (mathematics itself a theory of formal, if abstract, knowledge) that every logical system contains breaking contradictions, and any attempts to “fix” these contradictions leads only to new sets of contradictions (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.) Even formal arithmetic can he exploited cleverly in order to make an equation where 1 = 0. When I learned this, I thought much the way that you do because I was still locked into my dualist way of thinking that turns reality into objects. How can contradictions in every logical system and every ontology lead to any conclusion other than there is no objective truth?
And the answer is that objectivity is not all there is to reality, as you so thoroughly pointed out. The contradiction that you made in your theory of no truth can be rectified by uniting the subject and the object and understanding that instead of separating these things as the dualists do, that actually the subject and object are united in contradiction. Lao Tsu was the master at this, which is why i have hope for you.
You are finding the pieces of the puzzle but haven’t put them together quite yet, there are still missing pieces. But with intellectual work often these gaps are invisible to us until we have enough of the facts uncovered so that the limits of our knowledge stop appearing as the edges of reality and begin to appear as gaps in understanding. You not only don’t understand my ideas, you don’t understand what you think are your own ideas. That’s okay, it just means we have work to do.
The word for this kind of reasoning, this ontology, is dialectics, and it has a long history both in eastern religion but also esoteric hermeticism which influenced much of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel reforged dialectical reasoning and developed a theory of history that surpassed Kant’s dualist libertarianism. In the subsequent century Hegel scholars elaborated on Hegels theory of history and oneness, and began to fuse his dialectical reasoning with French materialism which was in vogue at the time but suffered from the same limitations of dualism which it had failed to surpass. Feuerbach managed to make a lot of extraordinary conclusions from this unity and coined the term dialectical materialism, but the master of dialectical materialism was certainly Karl Marx. However it was his collaborator Engels who penned the work Anti-Duhring which laid the foundation for future generations of dialectical materialists. In it he puts forward a few rules which I might describe for you but you can also look them up yourself, they are described in the first section of the book, on philosophy. If you want to know more I’d be happy to go into more detail. He’s a pretty digestible author, and I think you’ll like his seething disdain for the illusions and idealism of the ruling class. That is who we need to surpass, not each other, but them. Or maybe who we were yesterday, as rise and grind of a mentality as that is, nothing is static and everything, including our selves, is becoming something else. What it is that we become is a matter for free will and circumstances to decide.
I won’t make an exhaustive case for the efficacy and predictive power of this kind of analysis, for that I would encourage you to read Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, particularly the last two sections on dialectics and Historical Materialism. Without that shared basis on which to discuss we will likely talk past each other from this point on.
Its also easy to assert that I’m just saying that the form of logic that I like is the one that determines truth. That’s not it, but I do believe that it is possible to determine what is true and real from a particular logical system, only that certain systems are better than others for solving certain problems. We have a scientific method (which also has limits) for determining the efficacy of any methodology, and without relying on the truth and realness of its conclusions we couldn’t have the advanced society that we have. Here is where we differ. You still subscribe to idealism, which implies that our thoughts change our environment, but you’ve found the limits of idealism and its made you determine there is no truth. Materialism asserts that the environment affects our ideas, which seems self evident in one regard but is almost completely alien to our popular conceptions. You haven’t even begun to explore this, at least you’ve given no indication of it. This is where you might continue your journey. I would choose the intellectual tools I need to solve a particular problem, not claim the tools are worthless because it can’t solve this particular problem, or that the problem is unsolvable. If I’m looking at history I use a historical perspective, if looking at figures, mathematical; this is something you can do and have done, but because you haven’t sufficiently questioned the overarching ontology of our era (and all ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, consider this!) its led you to the negation of meaning. But instead of stopping your inquiry at the discovery of a contradiction, this is where we would start our inquiry, since the presence of a contradiction implies the presence of a dialectical opposite, such that our subject is merely a part of a system, a monistic whole, which modern logic utterly sucks at detecting even though it is apparent to anyone with sense abilities and a subjective mind to experience them.
I appreciate your comments, and apologize for any “intellectual arrogance” I don’t mean to be like patronizing, I’m just having a bit of fun. Bourdieu once wrote something like, when you express any strong opinion you make a clown out of yourself, and so that’s all I’m doing, a bit of clowning. However the assertion that I havent though as deeply as you have on this issue, or that I’m adhering to some orthodoxy that blinds me to the truth that there is no truth (lol) is perhaps the biggest clown of all.
There’s likely much you could school me on, but not this, at least, not yet! But I also believe that discussion is the medium through which much personal growth becomes possible, which is why I actually like to discuss this stuff, not to clown or debate but to grow.