Philosophy as a Problem

I am liking you more and more

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What is this "liking," Absane?

I'm afraid it's far too late for me.

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I know where you live! I find myself to be a bit on the obssesive side. I suggest you change your name and move out of the country.

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Nah, come on over! We'll indulge in several sessions of stoic sophistry.

 

Meantime

“Consequence” is a human term denoting a relationship.

“Social Infrastructure” is a term denoting the context within which a relationship has meaning or is necessitated.
Society is an extension of the human condition. A necessary end result of the relationship between man and his environment - the Self and the Other.

All observations are burdened by the paradoxes of subjectivity.
I cannot escape the premises which I hope to explain and so I speculate endlessly – Philosophy, Science, Art.
I pass on my perspectives to the Other and collect the Other’s perspective in turn - conflict/cooperation.
In the process I construct a shared reality.

Your “corporeal needs” are not social constructs.
Social constructs are Needs given institutional structure.

I do not feed because society forces me to but because I lack the ability to be self-reliant.
I lack and so I seek completion in and through the other. I consume and I assimilate him or I am consumed and assimilated by him – either one determined by the relationship between the unity which I call 'I' with that of the 'other' or 'others' which I call 'them' or 'him': Power balances.
I am powerful or weak in relation to another. This is why power is relative and a matter of degree. In essence we are all weakness seeking power or imperfections seeking perfection or instabilities seeking stability or the lacking seeking fulfilment.

“Will to Power” is my struggle to find self-reliance in relation to the other.

No infrastructure places itself “outside” the universe except those childish ones claiming truth and imagining paradise and eternal life.
Social structures place themselves over the parts and force specific relationships between them; they create collectivity and cause/effect.

All this ‘within, not “outside”, the relationship of otherness we call the universe.

Your many manifestations of Self in Need (libido, love/hate) are all meaningful in relation to the Other – whether imagined or present.
Identity is a product of negation – to paraphrase Sartre. It is an imprecise generalization based on differentiating between the ‘I’ and the ‘They’.
I am Me because I am not this or that or him or her.
I find myself by excluding what I am not.

It can be called “Autopoiesis”. I create myself by placing barriers between myself and the other, creating the duality of in/out, physical/mental.
In so doing I construct an artificial space within which I have some control and within which I can efficiently utilize my energies to create order.

Discrimination is the absolute act of individuality.
So political pressures for equality are really the weakening of individuality.
I exclude, I label, I am intolerant, I discriminate, I categorize, I reject and so I create the boundaries of my individuality; the space within which I create my Self.

I do not tolerate foreign objects within my boundaries, thusly creating my physical being.
I am me because I am different than the other. I might be ‘like’ him but I am not him.
I resemble but it is what I differ at which constitutes me.
To find identity in the collective, as it is popular to do these days, is to seek the dilution of the self within a larger unity.
It is an act of suicide.

I find terms to characterize my Me through how I relate to the other(s), creating a context within which I acquire meaning and purpose.

In essence I am a Nothing trying to be a Something and finding identity in what Something I choose to try to become.
The choice of which Something I strive to become is constructed by the contextual relationships of the Other(s) which populate my reality and which I call my World.
I am that which is trying to become this or that (Ideal).
I am kind, not because I am kind but because I try to be.

I am human in relation to an animal or a rock within the context of an environmental condition I call nature.
I am male or female in relation to my procreative relationship with others which is necessitated by my lack of self-reliance (mortality).

I am a mailman or rich or sick in relation to the social environment I find myself in which necessitates a context in which I must play a role, find a social identity, and which, itself, is necessitated by an environment which must be overcome through unification due to my inability to be self-reliant. My lack necessities a unity with the other and leads to both my meaning and purpose but also my limitations.
When I choose I exclude all other choices.

I become a manifestation of a comparison which creates a system of relationships. I am tall or short in relation to a common, average height and I identify my being with the label "tall" or "short".
I am smart or stupid in relation to an average.

The other offers me an identity in relation to him by restricting the possibility of my freedoms.
I am not anything-I-wish-to-be because I find myself, I identify myself, in relation to the other which defines me and limits me and which I define and limit in turn. This limitation creates a web of inter-relations constructing a context within which I find purpose and meaning.

It’s akin to Quantum physics theories. The observer fixes the observed; its infinite possibilities are frozen or contained within the observers gaze and so the wave becomes a particle.

“Social consciousness” is a shared reality, produced when enough minds are integrated within a context (a web of relationships) and in which each participant abandons his freedom and self-limits himself, self-censors, in accordance with a shared ideal to create an identity or a community of reciprocal identification.

I am a Mexican or a police officer or male or human because the other recognizes me as such and treats me as such and who participates, with me, in a shared context where these labels mean something.

My reason knows, if it delves deep enough and deconstructs itself, it comes to be aware of its own Nothingness. It reacts in terror and despair and seeks solace in the Other who offers him the illusion of substance and who frees him from the responsibility of self-realization. The s\Nothingness escapesin the shared illusions of the Other(s).

Nihilism is the natural end to all introspection. The reaction to it is determined by the biological unity’s (self) particular historical (genes) and experiential characteristics.

“Big Shit” only for those that have taken life and themselves seriously.
Liberating for those that “…fear nothing, hope for nothing” and are free.

Zorba’s dances, not because he is happy or because he is powerful, but because he recognizes and accepts his nature and the limitations of his existence.
He does not dream of escaping suffering, while absurdly expecting to retain consciousness (Consciousness and Suffering are tautologies), but because he embraces his being and appreciates its ephemeral pleasures and pains.

He becomes free in that instant. Free from identifications and expectations and fears and hopes and disappointments. He rejoices in the liberty of being Nothing and Nobody; drinking in the spectacle of Becoming and striving with no purpose but that of experiencing the sensation of exertion and strife which is living.

When one recognizes consciousness as being the state of experiencing the universe flux then one sees that to strive for comfort and peace and happiness and unity and all those human projections of human frailty, is to strive for the things that make life mundane and meaningless.

Contentment and existence are so antithetical that the more content a mind is the more soft and stupid it becomes, the more unworthy of living.

Nature punishes prolonged contentment (decadence) by preferring the individual who suffers and pains and strives and is discontented.
The body, or mind, that suffers and hurts becomes hard and strong and efficient and intelligent. The body, or mind, that wallows in pleasure and avoids all discomforts, becomes soft and weak and vulnerable and stupid.

Stability results in stagnation.
When I am happy, absolutely content, I am motivated by nothing. I need and want nothing.
I truly embody my Nothingness. I cease living.

The perfect, if we can imagine such a thing, would be characterized by inertia.
There would be no reason for anything.
The pinnacle is reached and all ceases.

We are the products of entropy and so resistant unities to its decaying forces. We find purpose in this resistance.
This is what makes us mortal and creates life.

It is Satan that makes us possible, to use Biblical imagery, not God.
We are the fallen trying to regain our obsolescence.
If intelligence and self-consciousness are products of an evolutionary process trying to overcome the obstacles to its existence then its very success makes intelligence obsolete.
If man were to attain godliness he would cease to Be. Consciousness exists in the turmoil of a universe that constantly reinvents itself, which is in constant upheaval and so in constant Need and Suffering.
We are Satan’s children.

Life is the resistance to entropy. Sex is a method of compensation for individual limits and weaknesses.
I procreate because I can no longer resist the universal attrition caused by the flux (entropy).
I have a shelf life. I pass on my legacy of resistance, which gives me purpose, to a copy of myself.

Man is a unity made conscious of his own dying (decay). This decay, like I’ve already said, is experienced as suffering/pain. It’s momentary alleviation is experienced as pleasure.
We could say that the pursuit of pleasure, which all of us indulge in to varying degrees, is really the pursuit of non-living.

To want nothing to need nothing is to be dead.
This is not an escape from universal flux, because even unconscious matter is still participating in the continuing creative/destructive process, but it is to be made unconscious of it.

Matter does not suffer because it has no conscious awareness of its decomposition and it does not know ecstasy because it has no conscious awareness of its composition.

Crying and laughing are both reactions to the same realization.

You choose to Be continuously.
You choose to be by striving to become what you can never hope to become.
In man this becomes the striving towards God which offers him the semblance of nobility.

Man strives to be the perfect, the omniscient, the omnipotent.
In other words to escape the context of the universe which produced him and which limits him. He strives to escape the absurdity of a universe repeating itself and never finding stability or, perhaps, he strives to detach himself from the relationships which define and determine him.

Every age is different and yet the same.
The human condition is unaltered as long at it remains unsurpassed.

 

Has anyone ever said anything about me?
baumgarten i feel pity for you..

 

The only problem I have with philosophy is having to revise two years of it by tomorrow morning for an exam... other than that it's an eloquent waste of time for the most part.

 

At the end of the day I have more questions than I came in with. It seems to grow at a geometric rate

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When I am dead, I will have figured that everything is to be questioned and there are no absolutes known to man.

 

Here is an absolute.

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We can all die!

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But are you sure? Is there anything that really dies at all?

 

Stay the course, young thang.
You know what the Man said, once upon a time in a land far, far away:
“Life is best left….. unexamined… “, or something like that.

Philosophy is an “…eloquent waste of time…” so do something vulgarly practical with your precious time and earn some money or become famous or get laid or travel.

You know….all the really important stuff of life.

:bugeye:

Now, now, all you kiddies do not fret too much with all this pondering and focusing on a single topic. You’ll all get tummy-aches, with all them big words and wasteful introspection, and you’ll have to postpone the Rave, where some of you hope to …bump into someone “special” with which you’ll spend some constructive time getting drunk with and banging, afterwards.
Who knows you might even meet your “soul mates” tonight and live happily ever after in a beautiful kingdom of flowers and butterflies.

Thinking is bad for you.
Doing is better.
So…just Do It!

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Then one day – oh a decade or so from now – when you stop suckling on mommy’s teat and being comforted by daddy’s tolerance, and you’ve done all the things that make life worth living – you know all the “normal” things - and find that they weren’t as gratifying as you thought they would be or that something was missing and you cannot understand why you feel so disappointed and regretful and empty and why you cannot seem to find satisfaction in the things you once imagined would fulfill you or why your well-being is so attached to another’s whims or why the world is so cruel and people wont just love each other and be happy, you’ll think back and tell yourself:
“Well, at least I didn’t waste my time eloquently.”

Do something practical with philosophy and earn a degree.
Become academics.


Excuse me for interrupting your very fascinating and constructive musings on this very important Forum which so perfectly lives up to the “Intelligent Community” label.

*This has been an emergency notification from the department of hard-knocks.
We now return you to your regular programming of musical sampling, flirtatious insinuations, teenage angst, adolescent profundity, laconic inanity, posturing, and infinite reruns. *

Here’s a good question:
“Is there free-will?”

or:
"Is there a God?"

Here's a better one:
"Sex"

Now discuss, children.

The real “problem with philosophy” is that it has become like art: a discipline accessible to the masses and practiced by the untalented and thick.
When you mass produce the thoughts of the gifted and make their words a commodity to be bought at the corner book-store or found while browsing for porn on the net or while trying to make friends, then you give the false impression that the other is capable of thinking when all he is capable of doing is memorization and regurgitation – ergo the tummy aches.

Your neighbour then, quotes Nietzsche, your butcher can recite, verbatim, from ‘Being and Time’, and your retarded cousin can try to get a degree in philosophy and become a professor.
When a parrot learns a few words, it might come to believe it is human, it might even convince someone that it is thinking like a human because it could imitate human sounds, but the parrot remains a bird and only acquires, through replication, the semblance of a human mind.

It repeats the words without actually understanding them.
It then cannot comprehend what all the fuss about language is.

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yes we all die..sadly.

 

What I meant was all parts of us.. not just the body, but the mind, perhaps the "spirit" within us. Not that I am sure what I am arguing, I am just asking "what ifs."

 

The mind is just an result of complex processes in the body so when the body goes the mind goes with it. As for spirit. There is no evidence to beleive a spirit or soul exists so that one really dosent matter. When we die were dead..but that makes this life all the more worth while.

 

I get the distinct feeling I struck a nerve.

 

I like satyr's posts. They make sense, and agrees with alot of my thinking, I just cant articulate my thoughts as well. Well done sir.

 

Satyr: “Consequence” is a human term denoting a relationship.
Okay, I see where you're coming from — I was assuming you meant the sort of "consequence" I was hence referring to, the evolutionary point of view, the chain reaction that science will speak of as evolving in consequence of. However, that precept always left me cold — as much as science does when it grabs the reins and attempts to "philosophize". Imagine all those stalwart figures in classical paintings elegantly poised in magnificent pride and strength but wearing starchy clinical white coats and a hand stuffed deep in a side pocket. Science is pragmatic and dictatorial and when it attempts to explain life it will too often rattle away something about an empty shell and an automated process void of personality, void of self-possession, and it will think that sufficient and genius.

Are you, Satyr, also becoming pragmatical in your advancing age?

Meantime: My mortal, corporeal needs, however, are held within the jurisdiction of our societal infrastructure.
Satyr: Your “corporeal needs” are not social constructs.
Social constructs are Needs given institutional structure.
That, more or less, wraps up a sampling of your pragmatism, a clinical prodding with a remarkably fine instrument perhaps but with an almost bored detachment bordering on the insane. Yes, there are social constructs and institutional structures by which we associate and are associated by. But through my relationship with them — you like that word — relationship with them, I am unfailingly capable of deducing, interrupting, countering, contradicting, negating such principles that constitute the system and our relationship to it. Yes, such an analysis of the system would be in consequence of having a relationship with it, but isn't that being taken for granted, that there's a relationship, a conjunction, a juxtaposition with the system? And can't we go further than that, than those pragmatic analyses of Self caught up in the System? And by going further, beyond the clinical prodding of a cold dead body, am I not evading an established System by way of my variance with it — made possible by my sense of self-possession? Am I thence not stepping outside a relationship with the system and pronouncing it insufficient, unacceptable, condemnable? Would I not be reinventing another relationship in its stead? Or, to go even further, would I not be sowing within the soil of a collective consciousness the seeds for discontentment, rebellion, anarchy that others will pick up on and interpret for themselves, by themselves, because of themselves? But to go further yet, do I care about anarchy and new relationships? Do I care about rebellion? Or am I not simply reacting in accordance with my spirit, my libido, my love, my meaning — the principles of my logic, my self-possession, my time?

Satyr: I am powerful or weak in relation to another.
When do you decide on that, before, during, or later on, after the moment? And even if you are more weak or powerful than another, how can it be supposed that you are by way of every angle of your being?

Satyr: “Will to Power” is my struggle to find self-reliance in relation to the other.
If your Will to Power is a struggle and dependent on others for its possession, then what Will are you referring to? Never mind Power.

Satyr: No infrastructure places itself “outside” the universe except those childish ones claiming truth and imagining paradise and eternal life.
And what's the Will to Power without the child, without a claim to truth, without an envisioned paradise, without the belief that its power is deathless? But an infrastructure understands those who have a Will to Power only too well… and takes appropriate measures to counter them, to protect itself.

Satyr: Social structures place themselves over the parts and force specific relationships between them; they create collectivity and cause/effect.
Right; it takes appropriate measures to counter the self-possessed, to protect itself.

Satyr: Your many manifestations of Self in Need (libido, love/hate) are all meaningful in relation to the Other – whether imagined or present.
Why Self in Need? Sounds like a rechargeable battery. Reliant on a wall plug.

Satyr: Identity is a product of negation – to paraphrase Sartre. [...]
I am Me because I am not this or that or him or her.
I find myself by excluding what I am not.
I liked Sartre's eyeglasses and that's about it. But again, the persistence of a need to rely on others for a Will to Power. And then you wonder why you must struggle for self-reliance. Hint-hint. A sense for the Will to Power perhaps, like all good infrastructures?

Satyr: Discrimination is the absolute act of individuality.
Not the only absolute. What comes before discrimination? What follows it? How does discrimination affect individuality? When can't it? Why will it matter if I apply my discrimination? Should I always apply my discrimination? Why do I discriminate? Where does it come from? Before or after my individuality?

Satyr: I do not tolerate foreign objects within my boundaries, thusly creating my physical being.
So much for curiosity.

Satyr: In essence I am a Nothing trying to be a Something and finding identity in what Something I choose to try to become.
Then if you know that, who knows it? Who decides when something suits you? If you're nothing looking for something to be, then how can you discriminate, choose, try to become, never mind identifying what it is you're looking to become?



I will question the process of my evolution, the process of my sentience, the process of my time. Sometimes it seems that sentience — mine, anyways — is not linear at all but will jump-start, kick off, fall back, or halt at any point. In fact, there are moments when a certain demeanor, highly "evolved" and progressive and ancient-feeling, recrudesces from youth, and still carries with it the residue of those timeframes, which is how I identify them from youth. There are times when I am like a volcano, a meteorite, then suddenly a glacier. I mean, there is always so much enigma in life that I cannot always pinpoint an origin, hence my question, "but is life really a consequence?"

 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act I sc.5.)

--- Ron.

 

Quite. And I think perhaps that's where the child comes into it...

 

For me that is where systems theory comes into it (cybernetics) as the science to usefully supercede philosophy.

Further to Hamlet consider for instance the Law of Requisite Variety:

The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.


--- Ron.