Yes. It’s why I prefer debate. I want a worldview which can survive challenges.
I love being startled above much else—finding that I’ve missed something. The recognition that there’s a better way to see.
In my view, that’s the test of knowledge—the ability to paraphrase. When I encounter a new concept, I worry at it, attempting to say it from many different angles, until the guy who’s presenting the concept acknowledges that I’m grokking him.
I have a weird view of that, which began when I was quite young. I could write a longish essay on why I declined to pursue academic philosophy, choosing to study language instead.
Not that I have any attitude at all toward the Great Thinkers. I don’t. I just made a specific decision early in my life to pursue my understanding of this place in my own way. From the bottom up, maybe I would say.
Well, there is more glory and money and sex in being an internet influencer, but I don’t really feel like a masochist as a philosopher. It is the surprise of a successful attack which attracts me. It doesn’t feel like pain.
Hume pointed out, as I see it, that we just in fact do trust in the battle-tested. We apparently can’t justify this trust deductively. We just “live” the uniformity of nature as an axiom in the blood. So we naked apes are empiricism. But a typical philosopher ignores our helpless dependence on the non-Euclidean and looks for a foundation in the form of a proofy system of words. I’m all for an economic and coherent sense of the world, but I wouldn’t frame it as “floating above” our brutal unjustified trust in the battle-tested. Indeed, any system that leaves this out comes off as divorced from life.
Same here. This thrill keeps me opening books and investigating new personalities online. Some books and people disappoint, because they merely repeat what I used to believe or currently believe. The thrill of a fresh insight is a pleasure that never gets old. It’s a healthy “addiction,” because you have to look into new fields, scan the margins, pick up old forgotten books, when you run out of the stuff emphasized in your own community.
100%. If you can’t paraphrase, you don’t yet have it. Writing is part of genuine reading. I also agree on your tacitly dialogical point about checking for confirmation. Bakhtin is great on this stuff.
Although my auto-didactic passion was primarily for philosophy, I decided to go to school for math. I don’t regret it. I think studying a non-philosophical discipline intensely and seriously was a good move. In retrospect, I might have been just as happy studying linguistics. Saussure is one of my favorite thinkers. In math, I love formal grammars and their connection to the theory of computation.
“From the bottom up.” I like that. If one insists on paraphrase, I suppose one is always climbing “out of” what the age takes for granted. We partially escape “presentism” or immersion in the water to which we are typically blind.
This sounds like it deserves the non-pejorative label of “masochism.” We can also phrase it in more masculine terms. The battlefield is exciting because it is a risk that requires courage. The “warrior” exposes himself or herself to injury, to chaos. If this “warrior” survives, then his or her “scars” are badges of hard-won increased sophistication.
To be honest, this is precisely one of the most important things you once infected me with. Processualists say everything is becoming. Substantialists say everything is substantial. Your view is dialectics—but, as we once determined, a negative one. Later, I expressed this literarily like so:
Choice, choice, choice… does all of life really consist of nothing but that? Does the entire uniqueness of our life appear to an outside observer merely as the sum of our choices? No. To think so would be too great a simplification. Intuitively, it seems there is something before the choice. Something given to us by our parents: a foundation upon which we then layer the scars of the decisions we make, until we inevitably reach the end.
In all seriousness, that is essentially all we know for certain before we make that very choice. Everything else is superstructure, clarification, and elaboration.
To put it philosophically, the construct would look something like this: a “thing” is the ongoing change of something that has neither beginning nor end. That is, while it seems you and I have a beginning to our own lives (and will surely have an end), our lives—our bodies—are exactly as they are and not otherwise; we are these specific instances of becoming, not those others. It didn’t happen like this: first we were born as humans, and then we turned into oak trees. All this implies that at the start of our lives, we possessed something that predated that beginning—something already scarred (call it DNA or a cell, if you like). Then we took this “something,” added new scars to it, and passed it on—in the form of children. (Though, yes, perhaps such an approach is too Darwinian.)
And that very fullness and completeness of form—which sparked this topic—is, in fact, the end. After all, if you take a fossil animal—it is no longer alive; its chain has been broken, and its form has ceased to change.
Every process has a specific structure of possibilities. The past limits the space of subsequent states. Yet, at the same time, completeness is a form that no longer reproduces itself through further becoming.
So it seems to me. If we can’t explain ourselves, or try, then maybe we don’t know ourselves. Maybe we’re isolated from the world of the apes.
Yeah, I often think of my life as a flight from boredom.
I envy that. I just didn’t have time for math, but I think it could be endlessly interesting.
My focus has always been general studies, but linguistics was a special pleasure. I’d spent my early life reading and using language, and one day discovered that I knew very little about it.
I woke up one day and found myself to be an ape in a strange place. That’s where it started. But I felt unhappy choosing one of the Great Apes and adopting his/her views, and so I just stepped off into the shit.
It speaks to the heart to me, not to the mind. Based around context, it matters upon prowess and how one chooses to prioritize ones goals in life.
Someone who is to rigid will become complacent and forget what it means to be truly weak and dependant on others. Humans are not breed to be independent at birth. A baby does not survive on its own. We require each other. It’s apart of who we are.
“According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” (Charles darwin)
You were allowed to win, your creator made you that way. I would trade a hundred of my days to live a day in your shoes. This is because you do not not what true despair really is. What it means to really lose in the end.
Yeah. I hate being bored. Fortunately, I almost never am. But I remember being a kid stuck at places without a book or a notebook. Or at bad parties, etc.
It’s pretty great. Every once in a while, I ignore philosophy and code for a few months. I don’t decide. Something just switches over.
I can relate. I especially remember becoming an atheist at around 18, having been raised as a Catholic. The world is far more mysterious and dangerous without a father figure creator painted on the sky. Of course this contributes to feeling supremely alone in a certain sense, which is not all bad.
Ah, so many of us share this unsettling aspect of our upbringing. I was raised by RC cultists, and for years afterward, I shied away from God and religion. Eventually, I ‘recovered’.
I am referring to a different context. Shakespeare’s works are complete. This does not mean they are fully fathomable, but it does mean that the words within them will not transform into different words. A stone, too, is ultimately unfathomable, for it will behave differently in every new set of relationships. Yet a stone lacks the life with which you and I are endowed: it cannot become a different stone of its own volition (even within the realm of possibility).
I was one of those 10-year-olds who suddenly lost Yahweh one day. It seems to happen to a particular type.
In my case, I had taken things very seriously up until then. A young Bible scholar… and then poof.
I think it’s why so much religious terminology has survived in my worldview—although entirely repurposed. I often call myself the Prophet of Uncertainty, for example, but only in the company of those who get the joke.
I’ve mentioned this on the forum before, and I still hold the same view: the people I’ve met who are into philosophy tend to have a “special” relationship with religion. You certainly won’t hear them say something like, “Well, there’s someone up there, but I don’t go to church.”
I tend to respect religion. Don’t let my fiery positivism suggest otherwise. I don’t tend to think highly of theoretical religion, because that’s just more metaphysics. It’s argumentative, pugnacious. The egoism shines through. And I’m not against egoism. I’m just saying that “metaphysical religion” usually comes off as Pepsi versus Coke. The “God team” people are the same type of person as their opponents. It’s the same “big word man” performance. But I’m not against this big word man performance. Positivism is aggressive, but it doesn’t mistake itself for True Religion.
I know some genuinely virtuous people who go to church. I don’t pretend that I see them as intellectually sophisticated, but I like them and would trust them more where it counts than a sophisticated person who screws people over. Schopenhauer is great on this issue.
The more I consider these things, the more I think that the commonly identified problem with religion is actually with our Western Abrahamic religions. It is they who seem to conform to your description . The others, those that I have come across, seem to offer a worldview that is more balanced, and less brutal and proscriptive. IMO.
The only Western religious movement I respect is the Quakers. The few of them that I have met have been thoroughly groovy people.
. The others, those that I have come across, seem to offer a worldview that is more balanced, and less brutal and proscriptive. IMO.