@socrates
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I like how the Buddhist Phenomenology books starts, the mind as another sense.
Downloaded this today as @”thetrizzard” is reading this currently.
The part about habits, as it has a deterministic and performative take.
In 1779 the famous Benjamin Franklin wrote in his article The morals of chess:
“The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn:
1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action …
2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: – the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; …
3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily….
Question:- What’s the difference between a man (theist) who judges another for having no belief in a God, and a man (atheist) who judges another for having a belief in God? Who is right and who is wrong? If they are playing the same game is it one that can be won? Who can tell me the outcome?
There is no difference, the outcome is tribalism.
Be that the current ideology, but what does that protected ideology amount to at the end of the day.
True, but people defend harmful economics regardless and a King is a symbol of power, dominance etc.
I see the king as being the next generation and how we attempt to bring about a good life for the ones that are to come after us.
Have you ever checked out anti-natalist arguments? David Benatar for example?
We naturally try providing a better life for ourselves whatever way that may be, with intent of passing on our genes in a safe environment rather than a torn up civilisation.
Recent political trends seem to suggest otherwise, although the intent is supposed to be about what you said here, I think blindness of what the future may entail distorts any notion of progress, progress itself could be said to be the ideology that causes harm in some respects.
I don’t really have any point of claim in the post I just thought it was interesting to think of society in a symbolic familiar way.
It’s a good post, should stimulate lots of interesting discussions. 🙂
All I know is that he’s a rapper.
I like Berkeley when he says ‘we must think with the learned and speak with the vulgar’, which is to say that in the language of idealism, causes are with spirits – fire no longer heats, water does not cool- these are done with spirit.
Christians seem to remain Christian and were never what I consider Christian really.
Christianity was never a monolith, in fact the term masks the interplay of many peoples, beliefs, practices and cultures…e.g. Sol Invictus
In its most exposed form, Gnosticism and Astrotheology reveal the basic structure of Christianity, although it is not entirely symbolic of course.
I was going to wait for @”thetrizzard” to give their interpretation, but I think I will provide it now with credit to him.
The time of year when we celebrate Christmas is the dead of winter, a time of death and cold, when survival is extremely hard and the days are short, darkness has its dangers etc, so what is more life-affirming than the birth of a child?
Some of Christian morality is life-denying, but I have had alternative view of resentment over the last year or so, resentment is a form of creation and resistance, of rebellion.
Also, some apostate Christians who become atheists act in ways that seem to suggest that denouncing the religion eradicates Christianity from the body instantly. This religion has been a major part of the formation of the culture we are born into and even though I was never raised Christian, I certainly have Christian ways of looking at the world and my principles are certainly Christian to some degree, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am an ‘anti-theist’, I just recognise that I embody the culture.
“All is a manifestation of Consciousness just as dream characters and ambience are manifestations of brains as mental processes.” – which has little to do with your reply:
“Reality is not a manifestation of consciousness and therefore a dream….Buddhist merely states that as things don’t have a self-nature (anatman), as all forms are inter-dependent, these forms are not fixed and are subject to change, it is only in this sense can we use the dream as a metaphor (not fixed and impermanent)”
It looks like it has a lot to do with it.
To say ALL is a manifestation of consciousness is to say consciousness is the fundamental substance of reality, the thing-in-itself. This is subjective idealism at best, solipsism at worst. This is saying that consciousness has a nature in and of itself. Idealism may be a way out of the dualism of Descartes, but it is counter intuitive to experience and solipsism (which I don’t think you are trying to get across by the way) is just silly, the idea that external reality would not exist, or that we can only be sure of our own experience at most, is the first brick wall for philosophical inquiry.
Whereas the other view is saying consciousness is an effect or inter-dependent relations and is constantly subject to change and ‘dream’ is the means of expressing this. That is dependent origination, therefore there is no such thing as the ‘thing-in-itself’ as the thing presupposes the other thing. This is to say in mind and body terms, that ‘I’ is always relational to the ‘Other’ and so we are constructed from the outside-in.
….nor can i see Atman and of the inter-dependency of forms being thrown together by serious Buddhist thinkers.
Seems to be part of many Buddhist thinkers, Thich Nhat Hahn, Shunryu Suzuki and Chuang Tzu to name a few big thinkers. Don from ilovephilosophy seems to be arguing a Gnostic type view that leads to idealism. Consciousness is an effect of matter, not the other way around and his use of the term ‘materialism’ misses the panentheist view of matter, that consciousness is a mode of nature/God, an expression of one and many. He’s just swapping the a priori term ‘spirit’ for ‘consciousness’. Just because something appears after the fact doesn’t make it insignificant, or not in anyway spiritual, it’s just acknowledging that one can’t exist without the other – dependent origination.
When he tries to refute the counter-claim he argues in a circular fashion:
For those who dismiss idealism out of hand, ask yourselves this: What is the fundamental (metaphorical) arena of existence where everything occurs and without which nothing could be attested to exist?
He’s saying that if we didn’t experience reality, if it can’t be attested to, then it doesn’t exist or truth claims are futile, but he’s missing the fact that ‘I’ is entirely relational, identity is a total construct made in the image of the other, from the outside so to speak and this is very different from idealism, this is dialectical monism. You can’t have one without the other, raw without cooked, I without you, so consciousness is after the fact – self-consciousness presupposes recognition from another consciousness.
Unlike more agoric situations, where a movie, play or novel is set in an entire world, cross country, or even intergalactic settings (although the latter was great in the BBC series Red Dwarf – another great claustrophilic situation), claustrophilia lets its boundaries be known ex ante and this physical limitation has mental and spiritual implications. Agoraphilic settings always have a beyond and unknown region, which subconsciously eases the audience knowing there is more beyond the selected area of appearances of each scene.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis has enclosure written all over it, not only within the confines of the paddock of insecurity, shame and resentment given with the enclosure of its occupants, we also feel the alienation of Gregor as he is pushed aside, abused and misunderstood, tentatively connected to his sister until his image of human-ness is unrecognisable due to how others have treated him/it. There is no escape and the relief that follows the grief is a most welcome, yet uncomfortable ambivalence. We feel freedom from his enclosed body as it departs the living and the freedom of the bodies of his parents and sister.
Abigail’s Party crushes us like a vice. Before Lawrence holds his chest and departs the cringe-a-minute prison that is his marriage to Beverley, enclosed by the party upstairs that puts unseen forces to work on the middle class occupants still rigid from modernity, we can’t help but breath easy when Susan retreats to the bathroom to attempt to recuperate from the ping pong game of spite, envy, competition and rigidity of the failure of each person in the room to achieve anything other than a set of repeated scripts under the influence of alcohol. He dies of embarrassment, and emasculation, trying desperately to express himself, even if it means it will kill him. Beethoven plays out his last few breaths of Beverley’s cigarette smoke and failure and the sobering reality of their monotony crushes them under the weight of their ineptness and denial, passive aggressiveness and dishonesty.
Docktor Faustus as portrayed by Christopher Staines was an hour and a half one man show, brilliantly conveying the refusal to accept limitations and as Mephistopheles provides him with frivolity after frivolity once he is bored with his new super powers, Faustus becomes ever more grateful for the closed space he rejected for his soul.
Who is Kendrick?
it really would be rather misleading or self-deluding to try to jam Eastern thinking with modern philosophical categories.
This implies that one is superior to the other, which I don’t think is the case. Philosophy is always a historical study, hence why anthropology and other historically invested subjects from the human sciences now have a massive influence on philosophy. What we call ‘western thought’ has its influence at some time or other with ‘east’ in some way.
I suppose the use of isms may be somewhat reductive from time to time, but there are well thought out and very diverse philosophical positions and subjects that have labels and categories, depending on the interpretation, we can end up with idealism, dualism, monism, occasionalism, etc, etc, etc.
If the modern ideas were presented to people of the past, they might not even be able to understand it in the same way. The words and their meanings are very different, and so the thinking was very different.
Yes, it is true that as culture changes, society and language, interests change too, the focal point of what objects we will study changes. As Foucault points out during his archaeological phase, during Renaissance Europe the Human Sciences didn’t exist as there was no human subject, all was perceived as written by God and man was to find the signs of God around him to reveal God and his way. To us in modern society, this may seem like obedience to a epistemological framework, but to those during this ‘epistemic event’ (episteme) it was the ontological groundwork of their reality.
As we moved into Modernity and the Enlightenment, the human subject was seen as separate from the physical world, which led to Humanism and ‘psychological man’ where subject and object came up side by side once more, man became the object of study.
Thus, we must conclude that there is no such thing as the ‘right’ interpretation of the many varying and diverse epistemic events which seem to forget each other as they pass, but on some deeper subconscious level, there is an absence presupposed by what is present-at-hand, during the transformations there were inclusions that were deferred and differentiated and which come back to haunt us, phantoms, what Derrida refers to as ‘Hauntology’.
They may not have been saying what we think they were saying, and in reading copious amounts of literature from around the world, I am pretty certain people are not wanting to really accept what was being frankly stated and finally, most readers seem to lack the symbolic vocabulary from the culture to really even make a proper choice of what Western category might better fit.
Don’t get me wrong however, saying there is ‘no right interpretation’ does not mean that all interpretations are equally valid! No one has ever truly believed that and never will, we just have to acknowledge that interpretation and meaning is never fixed. It is relational, differentiated and has the appearance of solidity, an effect of a congealing over time.
The more I look into post-structural thinkers, the more I see a striking resemblance to some Buddhist views of reality and experience, these thinkers were even in some ways directly influenced by these profound texts and I view Chuang Tzu as a kind of proto-existentialist in many ways, the doctrine of emptiness is an amazing and liberating conceptual framework of being that is equal in significance to the philosophy of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Butler and others who have views of non-self when it comes to identity within structures.
To understand the East and even the past, one has to familiarize themselves with the languages of symbols and themes.
The same goes for the ‘west’.
Modern people say one thing or write one thing and mean just that. Ancient people were often saying multiple things at once when they wrote it down, unless it was an actual bill or receipt. This continues until very recently, old terminology was still very symbolic.
Again, I see the same kind of inter-disciplinary approach in structuralism and post-structuralism, which starts from the premise that there are no fixed meanings and so saying one thing presupposes at least a ‘two thing’.
A nice way to put it might be that ancient people spoke in swathes, especially when dedicating things to writing which was especially a painstaking and rare process. They were not like most people today who in writing generally mean one specific precise object at a time.
While poetic and aesthetic approaches to knowledge can be difficult for modern thinkers, I will give you this at least, those within the Analytic tradition outright reject the more artistic style of continental thought as it was radically different from their formal style and gave post-structuralism an unfair hearing and in many cases, completely misrepresented the arguments without even reading the texts, declaring it sophistry.
I think it can take a long time to decipher a text that has multiple themes and concepts running through it simultaneously and does require a piece by piece analysis in order to grasp the whole picture. I don’t think people intend to be overly reductive when they focus on ideas in this way, it’s more like breaking down the whole into smaller parts to see how they link up and relate to other ideas and themes. This is a never ending process, it is constantly evolving and being rediscovered, some times we obtain important tools which can be put to use elsewhere, but it takes time to digest.
Some albeit vague overviews of the arguments for Panpsychism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism?wprov=sfsi1
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