This is a PDF from the writer of my ‘What is Capitalism and how can we destroy it?’ series.

What is anarchy? An idea that helps guide this desire. Anarchy means: no rulers. No domination. No one is a master and no one is a slave.
But we live in a world of domination. The overwhelming force of the state, the all-pervading power of the market, the ever-present oppressions of species, gender, race, class, religion, down to the petty hierarchies and degradations of our everyday lives and personal relationships, the social norms of status, submission, isolation dug deep into our bodies. In totality: a system of shit.
So how can I possibly live free in this world? If freedom means utopia, a world with no more domination, then it’s a hopeless quest. By now we know that no god, no great revolution, is going to appear and take us to the promised land.
Instead, living freely can only mean living fighting. It means seizing what moments and cracks of freedom I can. It means attacking and uprooting as much as I can the forces of domination around and within me.
And again: I want to live joyfully. I have had enough of sadness, fear, and despair.
Does it sound like there’s a contradiction here? Growing up in this thing called liberal democracy, they tried to teach me that struggle is bitter. At best, conflict is something nasty you have to face up to sometimes, while dreaming of a world of perpetual peace.
This way of thinking can’t work for us now, if it ever did. There is no end in sight, no new world to come. There is only this world, with its pain and cruelty and loneliness. And also: its delights, all its sensations, encounters, friendships, loves, discoveries, tenderness, wildness, beauty, and possibilities.
This is the key idea of Nietzsche’s philosophy: affirm life, say yes to life, here and now. Don’t try to hide from struggle in fantasy worlds and imaginary futures. Embrace life’s conflict, and yes you can live freely and joyfully.
Of course, it’s not easy. It involves danger, and also hard work. We face enemies in the world around us, institutions and individuals that set out to oppress and exploit us. And we also face forces within ourselves that work to keep us passive, conformist, confused, anxious, sad, self-destructive, weak.
To fight these forces effectively, we need to make ourselves stronger, both as individuals and as groups of comrades, friends and allies. And one part of this is striving to better understand ourselves and the social worlds we are part of. Ideas are tools – or weapons. But many of the ideas we learn in contemporary capitalist society are blunt or broken, or actively hold us back. We need new ways of thinking, and developing these can involve exploring the work of past thinkers – not as sacred masters but as ‘arsenals to be looted’.
One source of idea-weapons, which I at least have found very helpful, is Nietzsche. I am writing this book to explain some of these Nietzschean ideas, as I understand them, both to clarify my own thinking and to share them with others.

I just checked out this interactive image: http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/

I also just watched this video by my friend and co-producer, Doazic:

We are all familar with this image:

It’s not a substantive topic, which is the important point in Doazic’s video, among other trivial things.

What is meaning? What does meaning ‘mean’? Vote using the poll, you are allowed multiple choices. If there is anything I haven’t mentioned in the poll for you to vote for, please discuss it below.

I just set the limit to 96mb for each file that is uploaded via the multi-uploader and it works great! Check out these fantastic works by Michel Foucault

Plato

Plato is the guy standing on our left hand side with his finger pointing upwards and his sucessor, Aristotle, who is on the right, is pointing downwards. This painting by Raphael is called ‘The School of Athens’ and it depicts the two very different views of reality and metaphysics that these two Ancient Greek philosophers have. Plato believed that properties to things in this world came from a universal realm of forms that was outside of (transcendent) this world, that there exists a Realm of the Forms that manifest in varying degrees that correspond closer to or further away from their universal quality, more on this later.

Aristotle believed that the way we can understand properties and universals is through the senses in this world, he had a view of immanant as opposed to transcendent properties of the forms. Each physical object is a compound of matter and form.

Let us stick with Plato for now in this thread.

The Similie of the Sun

The Greek word eidos is present in our current word for asteroid, which means ‘star-like’. Eidos means like, kind and form – it was a the best word Plato had to describe properties of things and their relations. A wheel for example, has the form of being round and is circular, so its universal property is that of circles, other objects that have circles are from the same universal form. Plato could also see various like-properties in other things in the natural world around him and believed that these forms must already be present in an abstract sense and we recollect these forms upon discovery. Plato then used logos to reason these forms and the problem of universals.

Plato reasoned that it was sight and the eye that had a faculty of recognition of these forms, it was the eye that allowed him to see and understand the world around him, but he knew it was not perfect, The Sun allowed his eyes to use this faculty as the light illuminated objects in the world for him to see them. He reasoned that the eye and the Sun has a like-quality to them, they were of the same kind of form and so the faculty of sight was linked to the faculty of knowledge and wisdom which came from light. When we gather enough knowledge and wisdom and have a greater understanding, we can be closer to the light of wisdom in the mind through the eyes, this was called Gnosis and it was what Plato would call The Good or Episteme.

The Sun is part of the intelligible world and the eye/sight is part of the visible world.

The Similie of the Cave

It is important to remember the use of the word ‘similie’ and in some texts it is ‘metaphor’ or ‘allegory’ of the cave and the sun, eidos means ‘like’, so it is a structure of knowledge that we use to define properties and their particulars and how they universally relate. Plato is a very mystical thinker and was inspired not only by Socrates (who the dialogues of Plato are centrally focused on, Plato never actually says one word in his dialogues) but by the Pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who is famous for running and kind of mystical school of thought.

The cave is what Plato’s The Republic is all about, everything he says relates to the metaphysics of this story. It is a frustratingly genius story that is hard to overcome and go beyond, especially in the political sense, but we will leave the major details of that out for now.

There are four prisoners in a cave who have been in there since they were babies, they have grown into adults and know nothing of the outside of the cave. Their hands and feet are bound in such a way that they can’t move anywhere, they can’t turn and see each other, although they can of course talk to each other, they know there are others with them in the cave. Their heads are also secured in such a way that they cannot turn around to look behind them.

The prisoners make a daily routine of naming these shadows and they reward each other whenever they name them correctly, a kind of game from memory. They will, according to Plato, be able to say a shade is a horse, or a cart, a man, or a child, but they will never know that the shade is a shade, as they can’t see the fire that causes this illusion to appear. Plato even suggests that they may percieve these images and shadows as Gods and may even worship them, creating their own prayers and customs, believing them to be appropriate rituals to appease the Gods.

Plato’s Similie of the Cave is meant to set the ground work for his political theory that advocates a Philosopher Ruler – someone who has a special kind of knowledge that allows them to rule over others who are not ‘in the know’, he isn’t advocating a tyrant, as he see tyrants as the logical outcome of democracy, which he opposes because it was democracy that led to the Death of Socrates. He instead wanted to create a political philosophy that would give a ruler wisdom, but these rulers can’t have anything to do with everyday people, as they will not be able to understand him and they don’t know what is Good.

Freedom for one of the prisoners

Plato then ‘frees’ or rather, ‘gives one of the prisoners more freedom’ by releasing him from his constraints. The prisoner walks away from the spot he has spent his entire life and can finally turn around to look at his friends, but more importantly, he can now see the fire and the actual objects that are projecting their images as shadows – and he recognises the shapes and now knows more than his friends as he can distinguish between objects and shadows cast on a wall. He understands how the light has revealed this to his eyes.

He then makes a venture further than any other of the prisoners and leaves the cave – blinded by the blazing sun, his eyes are in agony as he adjusts to the outside world. Plato describes this as being similar to when we learn things that we can’t accept or understand as they are too overwhelming. Eventually his eyes adjust and he sees colours, more objects that cast shadows and movements of the sun, he is overcome with wonder and even sees the sun set and rise again.

He is so excited about this new world of knowledge that he returns to the cave to tell his friends. When he returns however, he can’t see so well in the dark as his eyes have been exposed to the brighter sun outside, the fire is very dim and colours are not so visible down here. When the games and rituals begins as objects pass near the fire to cast thier shades on the wall, he fails to recognise them and makes several mistakes, the others laugh at him and feel angry, that he has commited sacrilige. He tries to explain that the world they know is not the full truth, it is not false or fake so to speak, it is a world where the senses are decieved into thinking it is the whole truth, when there is a world beyond the walls of the cave that reveals the truths of this cave and more wonderment. The prisoners ridcule him and mock him, they tell him the trips away from the cave has poisoned his mind with lies and that he would be better off sitting back in the cave, something he knows he can never do again. If the prisoners could move and approach him, they would kill him. At the same time, the enlightened one sees no value in their ‘honours and rewards’ and leaves them behind forever, knowing they don’t know what is best for themselves.

The Divided Line

The cave and the sun similies/allegories/metaphors set up Plato’s ontology (the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being, a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.) Although the correct way to understand the forms is in an epistemological sense – as a theory of knowledge.

Plato believes in universal properties, he thinks there is an ultimate form of The Good which is in the realm of the forms, outside of human perception, it can be accessed through dialectic and mathematics, reason. Knowledge itself is the closest form of the Good, with Episteme (the practices of Geometry and Algebra, reason and dialectic) as practices of Goodness. Gnosis (knowledge) is completely abstract, intelligible.

The lesser forms of the Good, are those situated in doxa or opinions, anything that is conveyed through the senses is farther away from the Good and can be deceptive, just like in the cave.

This layout of metaphysics sees the physical world as being ‘less real’ than that of the forms. Socrates was famously happy when he was sentenced to death by Athenian Democracy as a scapegoat for their losses at war with Sparta – one of the main themes of The Republic – he did not value this world at all, he was filthy, never washed or changed his clothes, he was very ascetic. He looked forward to death and what lay beyond in the realm of the forms.

This was very new to the Greeks, they did believe in an after-life, but it was Hades – a place of immense boredom and grimness.

“I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some landless impoverished peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.”…
— Achilles’ soul to Odysseus

Achilles would rather be a slave to a landless peasant than be in the Greek after-life with Hades! That’s how bad it was, but there is a positive interpretation here, one that Friedrich Nietzsche picks up on his works, that the Greeks before Socrates valued this world more than anything, that it was what you do here and now that counts. Socrates hated this world and instead proffered the other world. These metaphysics would later inspire Gnosticism in Christianity in the form of Neo-Platonism, which was a ressurection of Plato from another philosopher in the Eastern-Roman Empire, Plotinus. There are other influences on this school of thought in religion, some from Zoroastrianism. The Gnostics didn’t interpret the lesser forms as simply ‘less real’ or ‘less good’, they introduced the term ‘evil’ and projected a tainted view of the physical world that saw the body as a prison for a divine spark that has to return to its source in heaven.

This brings this introduction to Plato’s metaphysics to an end for now.

Human beings are in a way condemned to wonder about how the different spheres of life, fit together and if they are good, true or beautiful – if you ask those kinds of questions, then you are doing philosophy.

Has philosophy progressed? Unlike the natural and human sciences, which have split off from philosophy to pursue their own methods (although the historical content of the evolution of these traditions is vast and interesting itself), philosophy doesn’t seem to have the same impact on people as being ‘progressive’.

We certainly can’t say it is a linear progression, as much of foundationalism has been left behind, but Karl Popper at least explained that falsificationism can at least refute old ideas and philosophy has a reputation for recycling old ideas in modern times, Plato and Artistotle are just as relevant as they were 2000 years ago.

We could say philosophical ‘progress’ is helical (like a helix spiral), but the twists of the spiral connect to previous periods throughout history and some of it drops off altogether. Chomsky recycled Cartesian (Descrates) innate ideas in his theory of how we learn language, that we simply cannot be a tabula rasa (blank slate/blackboard) in order to learn language. Spinoza has also come back into usage in certain cognitive sciences to explain the connection between body and mind.

Philosophy comes down to values, progress is a question of valuing, what is better, or worse.

Realism seems to be the main conceptual notion of truth in philosophy, with anti-realism as its opponent, relativism being the main one. There is only so much we can grasp through the intellect and with reason, which is restricted by the incredibly complex environments we occupy in our time. To some degree we can have an effect on these environments through our own experience, what Kantians will call funding – an analogy is to think of a horses hoof, which does not so much shape the ground it presses against, but stumbles and scuffs and sometimes fits and sometimes it does not. In the same way, our biological inheritance of the central nervous system that makes up the main components of our cognitive capabilities does not completely shape the world around it, but sometimes it can grasp one or two spheres of life and try to explain them.

This section will serve as a glossary, or ‘wiki’ section. It is for the bare bones basics of philosophical concepts and terminology. If you discover any terms that you would like to define here, please feel free to open a thread.

To post in this section, you must include:

[list=1]
[*]The terms of the concept or terminology/jargon
[*]An example of its usage
[*]Any sources that could further assist users
[/list]

These two terms are of importance in philosophy. Philosophy is all about using reason alone to explain what is in existence. This means we have to look at our own experience from a subjective position first of all (see the thread about Descartes in the general section) to explain the other things outside of our experience.

a priori

Anything that is a priori is independent of experience, this is anything that we talk about that exists before we experience it. We could say that a priori is objective.

An example of an a priori statement:

All bachelors are unmarried males

To keep things simple, I will leave out the Immanuel Kant usage of this term for another introduction thread. All that matters for now, is that a bachelor will always be an unmarried male by definition and it is therefore independent of my experience, it is before experience and therefore a priori.

a posterori

This kind of knowledge is dependent on experience. So an a posterori statement will look like this:

On this forum, there are unmarried males.

This is not something you could know for sure without checking with members of the forum if they are unmarried or male, that is why it is a posterori.

That’s the basic definitions anyway, I like to think of them as alternative terms for objective and subjective.

Philosophy is not like scientific (as in naturalistic and empirical science that uses the scientific method) knowledge, as it will always start from the mind and will always use language and logic. There are always lots of concepts that simply evade falsification in a scientific method, which doesn’t make philosophy invalid, it just has to come up with new methods and processes to explain what is going on in the world in the best possible way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-ChQ33SII4

I was looking around for the movie to the book and I found this. This movie brings up interesting themes about social character and how we are judged in society. After the main character kills a man in the heat of the moment, he is asked to justify his actions, but his view of life is very short-term compared to everyone else who judges him. They bring up his lack of emotion toward his mothers’ death and various irrelevant subjects that have no bearing on the murder he commited and then priests begin to offer further assuarance of punishment or salvation in an after-life, yet he is atheist. He come to terms with death by recognising the indifference of the Universe.

Another interesting theme is he is a kind of Socrates-type character, he has commited acts that are against what the state has in mind and is executed for it, but instead of cherishing another world of forms, he prefers the material world and sees nothing beyond it, if his own mothers’ death didn’t bother him, why would an after-life?

Today people generally are called “narcissistic,” because of their preoccupation with “inner” processes. Bookstores offer walls of popular psychology. On subways and buses one hears psychologically sophisticated, introspective talk, with subtle distinctions and puzzlements. Twenty years ago such talk could be heard only in a therapist’s office.

Millions are involved in psychotherapy, self-help networks, ashrams, encounter groups, meditation, interpersonal training, and other experiential processes.

Some have called all this the “Awareness Movement.” One cannot simply approve, condemn, or ignore it all, but it is difficult to evaluate. We can say, for better or worse, that a major social change is taking place.

I started reading this earlier, please feel free to join in and we can talk about this.