Philosophical Speculations

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:48 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 5:26 pm (except bacteria part)

Come on, every body knows that humans are just space suits and Application Programming Intephases for anaerobic endogastric bacteria, which became necessary after the plants poisoned the air with oxygen.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 am
I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Bad Totalizing Stories that’s missing from some of the others, and for that reason I disagree that I’m beginning with a fallacious presupposition.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 5:26 pm

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 am

Ashvin wrote: We may disagree on that last part too, in which case I will just keep the metamorphic process within this lifetime for now.

I don’t disagree that What-Is which is you is also the What-Is which is me, and my grandmother, and each bacterium in my stomach. And there is a sense, of course, in which I am what I am through what you are, and what my grandmother was, and what the bacteria in my stomach are -- I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s word “interbeing” for this. And so whatever is learned and verified in one lifetime ultimately finds expression through many lifetimes. It may end up being overturned in some other lifetimes, then reestablished in yet others, or synthesized in new ways, or just forgotten. “Learning” and “verification” are always temporal and provisional.

With that said, I don’t believe there’s some kind of personal structure, some aspect of my individual soul, that survives death in order to be reincarnated, such that there will (for example) arrive an infant carrying memories of my experiences. Remember that I affirmed with you the “inseparable connection between the spiritual and the physical.” This non-survival is key to the differences between me and a whole lot of metaphysics and theologies I’ve come across, most of which seem to be seeking out some way of justifying the idea that we survive death.

(Even secular, materialist people with a poetic streak will sometimes twist themselves in knots talking about how the heat in our bodies disperses and is carried by the Universe forever or literally anything to keep from facing death squarely.)

I think I agree completely with the first paragraph (except bacteria part) but not at all with the 2nd, so at least we are splitting the difference

DandelionSoul wrote:In faith we seek justice, knowing all the while that it is temporary and provisional. In faith we act with compassion, knowing that those to whom we extend it will suffer anyway. In faith we make peace, facing squarely the conflict that will undo it. In faith, we love without illusion. Death loses its sting when we love in its shadow. Death loses its victory when it cannot stop us from justice-seeking, peacemaking, and compassion. When we love in the heart of the yawning abyss, we overcome death.

This faith is our only true hope, not the hope of an idyllic future, but the hope that we can choose to love no matter what shape the future takes and in what guise death ultimately finds us. We find ourselves in the people and projects to which we give ourselves, but only if we do so authentically, knowing that to give ourselves to anything is to give ourselves ultimately to death, to loss and grief. The life that emerges from the embrace of death, from choosing to live fully here, now, in this very moment, in the depths of the abyss, is nothing short of resurrection.

Ashvin wrote:“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

What is it about the modern era which lingers on to make us so feel gloomy all of the time? We can hardly move an inch before being seized by doom from the entertainment or "news" media. Politics, as usual, is no beacon of hope. Neither is Academia. Philosophical and spiritual realms of discourse traditionally provided us some rays of sunlight, but that is patently not the case anymore. Most of our intellectual and spiritual knowledge is now employed in service of finding ever-more ways to convince ourselves that the 'end is nigh'; that the "Apocalypse" is right around the corner. The few times we are offered messages of hope, those messages are couched in the context of escaping from-the-world rather than being-in-it.

These machinations of modern culture are justified to us on the grounds that they are "realistic". So what exactly is "reality"? Is it something we derive from a living participation in the world or from a detached reflection on the world as an object of our knowledge? The nihilistic view is that of the latter. It is the view which flows naturally from Rene Descartes' divide of the world into realms of 'spirit-mind' (subject) and 'matter' (object). Immanuel Kant, as discussed in Res Ipsa Loquitur: Kant vs. the World, then took Descartes' subject-object divide for granted and further divided the realm of 'spirit-mind' into what is actually real and what is merely experienced as real. The latter, according to Kant, is the world of phenomenal appearances we live in, reflect on and systematically investigate.

It does not take a huge stretch of our imaginations to see where Kant's epistemic logic has taken us; to see why his epistemology is fundamentally pessimistic-nihilistic at its core. The world of appearances is the world we live in. It is the only world we ever experience and reflect on in normal waking consciousness. What if you were to wake up one day, walk to the bathroom mirror, and see no one in the mirror's reflection. Then you would begin to experience as an individual what humanity has already begun to experience as a collective. You would feel not only confusion, but also despair in confronting what it means when the phenomenal world no longer reflects any aspect of yourself back to you.
...
We do not all live in our own personal bubbles of consciousness, passing information back and forth between our bubble-avatars in some unknown manner. Rather, we share the same space of consciousness with each other and with the Spirits who inform our existence and experience. We exited our Edenic paradise as the Spirit came to know itself through its forms. That is what makes human beings capable of true communication and empathy. It is what allows us to experience the same ideal content and perspectives of other beings. As we grow spiritually and mature, we uncover the complicated network of noumenal relations and we come to know for ourselves what we once merely took on faith alone; what we once naively believed.

"A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n"
-John Milton, Paradise Lost

JustinG wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 12:01 am

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 am
I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Bad Totalizing Stories that’s missing from some of the others, and for that reason I disagree that I’m beginning with a fallacious presupposition.

Interesting discussion going on. I think Postone's take on totality is relevant to DS's remarks about totalizing stories. In describing his own take on totality whilst criticizing that of Derrida (which seems similar to that of DS), Postone writes (https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/upl ... damarx.pdf) :

"...totality here is the object of the critique. This approach, like Derrida’s, is critical of homogeneity and
totalization. However, rather than denying their real existence, this critique grounds
processes of homogenization and totalization in historically specific forms of social
relations and seeks to show how structural tensions internal to those relations open up
the possibility of the historical abolition of those processes.

The problem with many recent critical approaches that affirm heterogeneity,
including Derrida’s, is that they seek to inscribe it quasi-metaphysically, by denying the
existence of what could only be historically abolished. In this way, positions intended
to empower people end up being profoundly disempowering, inasmuch as they bracket
and render invisible central dimensions of domination in the modern world."

So, Postone argues that both the affirmation of totality and the denial of its historical existence further oppressive structures. Hence, when postmodernist philosophers like Lyotard declare that "the world is a fable", this does nothing to change historical realities, and instead leads to things like insularity, fragmentation and the narrowness of identity politics.

To put this view in terms of the language being used on this forum - Yes, there is a historically dynamic metamorphic progression, and yes, this progression has oppressive and totalizing features. But the oppressive and totalizing features cannot be overcome by simply asserting that they have no sound philosophical foundation. Rather, they can only be overcome through the historical dynamic itself (in which individuals can participate). I think this accords well with Barfield's horseshoe diagram.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 3:07 am Thank you for sharing this! I suspect that we are roughly agreed. At least, I agree wholeheartedly that there have, in fact, been many totalizing structures within history, and that breaking down those structures always takes place within a lived history, rather than merely by means of an academic deconstruction. With that said, I'm primarily offering metaphysical critiques here because that's the nature of this forum.

My issue with the Barfield diagram and with Ashvin's metaphysics more broadly as I understand it so far (and, I suppose, Steiner's?) is precisely that they seem very much to posit an ultimate totalization as a good thing -- that the collapse of embodied differences is something that will happen, and that its occurrence is to be hoped for. I disagree on both points

AshvinP wrote: Also keep in mind a fundamental premise of my view is that we all are being 'asked' [by the Cosmos, whatever that is] to make choices going forward and our choices actually matter, so nothing is guaranteed. Theoretically everyone could choose not to participate in the sort of Self-knowledge I am advocating and then the current human species is effectively wiped out by mechanization. All of these things remain possibilities, however slight a chance of happening, and even if they are not possibilities, we should act as if they are.

Sartre wrote: Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 10:05 pm

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 9:48 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 5:26 pm (except bacteria part)

Come on, every body knows that humans are just space suits and Application Programming Intephases for anaerobic endogastric bacteria, which became necessary after the plants poisoned the air with oxygen.

Those AEB are way too low resolution for me... I'm with Hoffman on that, my API interface just gives up when we get down to that scale. But, in general I agree - one life form's "exploitation" is another life form's evolution! Eventually all these secrets of Nature will be cleared up in the spiral of temporality becoming eternity.

JustinG wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 12:01 am

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sat Jul 03, 2021 11:29 am
I agree and disagree with you. I agree that I think that if the consequences of totalizing world narratives have been, on the whole, terrible, then that should prompt a hard look at the tree the fruit is growing from. I’m open to the possibility that the hard look will reveal something about the Bad Totalizing Stories that’s missing from some of the others, and for that reason I disagree that I’m beginning with a fallacious presupposition.

Interesting discussion going on. I think Postone's take on totality is relevant to DS's remarks about totalizing stories. In describing his own take on totality whilst criticizing that of Derrida (which seems similar to that of DS), Postone writes (https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/upl ... damarx.pdf) :

"...totality here is the object of the critique. This approach, like Derrida’s, is critical of homogeneity and
totalization. However, rather than denying their real existence, this critique grounds
processes of homogenization and totalization in historically specific forms of social
relations and seeks to show how structural tensions internal to those relations open up
the possibility of the historical abolition of those processes.

The problem with many recent critical approaches that affirm heterogeneity,
including Derrida’s, is that they seek to inscribe it quasi-metaphysically, by denying the
existence of what could only be historically abolished. In this way, positions intended
to empower people end up being profoundly disempowering, inasmuch as they bracket
and render invisible central dimensions of domination in the modern world."

So, Postone argues that both the affirmation of totality and the denial of its historical existence further oppressive structures. Hence, when postmodernist philosophers like Lyotard declare that "the world is a fable", this does nothing to change historical realities, and instead leads to things like insularity, fragmentation and the narrowness of identity politics.

To put this view in terms of the language being used on this forum - Yes, there is a historically dynamic metamorphic progression, and yes, this progression has oppressive and totalizing features. But the oppressive and totalizing features cannot be overcome by simply asserting that they have no sound philosophical foundation. Rather, they can only be overcome through the historical dynamic itself (in which individuals can participate). I think this accords well with Barfield's horseshoe diagram.