Nah. I haven't obtained such striking MS paint skills quite yet.

It wasn't so much the artistry as the concept, personally.

This thready makes my brain feel funny

Reply to my reply in the instrument forum, sucka.
:D

The bolded and underlined contradict. One cannot have free choice and at the same time be determined by another's will. I mean, you might believe in compatibilism, but then I would need to know how you define a choice. So if you could specify that then I would have some sort of understanding.

What do you mean by "purify?" I mean, I don't know your scale of what is pure and what is not so it is hard for me to understand exactly what you are trying to say. What I am interpreting is that you believe that this purification is through the realization of this so called "state" in which we are paradoxically in control of our own lives, but also being controlled by others. I mean, it seems as if you embrace contradictions and such. With that kind of thought one could make anything believable. I also don't understand what struggle you are talking of. Defining oneself is what gives us individuality and a sense of unique purpose. I mean, how far you want to take uniqueness is based on your reason. Personally, I believe we have no essence because of the fact that one is determined by his essence. Instead we have the free will to choose freely or be determined by others, which generally speaking is just free will. The reason this is better to believe is because this puts the ultimate responsibility of one's choices on himself. Therefore, his choices are what gives him that sense of uniqueness. From there one can build a pseudo-essence by choice. By pseudo-essence I mean that he creates himself an essence, but ultimately when it comes to his choices this essence does not affect him.

Even if all thought is anthropocentric, why would one just walk away from the fact that some ways of thinking are more objective than others? I mean, I think a lot of this philosophy that struggles to find that deepest of truths is really interesting, but what benefit does it have on life itself. One could get more out of life by living by the themes of the play Our Town than one could find in this stuff. I mean, this is why I don't understand this philosophical problem anymore. I mean, you may ultimately "believe" in this, but do your actions necessarily reflect this philosophy? Do you actually live as if nothing is true? Of course not. Think of Sisyphus. He realized that there was ultimately nothing, but he kept pursuing. In the same way the objectivities may ultimately be worth nothing, but they are the best we have. They are the only way to beat the rock.

Ultimately, my problem is that with all of this post-modernism I feel like philosophy is drifting from its core purpose. No longer does one care about the best way to exist. Now it is about sacrificing one's existence for a truth that they have no need for, a truth that leaves no evidence of existence. Most post-modernists would say that they are anti-elitism, but I find them to be the most elitist philosophers of them all. Simply because they talk about jargon that really does not affect the existence of the individual, the only thing we "truly" know exists, (according to them.)

I'm not really sure what you're responding to. Do I live as if nothing is true? I never said that 'nothing is true,' and if I did believe that, how would I act on it? There is no basis for action there. I could do anything and it wouldn't affirm or deny such a belief. If a particular philosophy is interesting, what further 'use' does it need? It fills your life with interesting thoughts to reflect on, that is how it benefits your life. Perhaps further understanding could lead one to nirvana or God, but it just seems like the top of Sisyphus' hill to me. Your criticisms of post-modernism seem pointless. Who/what are you actually criticizing? Most 'post-modernists' don't agree with each other, and barely agree with themselves. I find a lot of it interesting, if somewhat depressing, and it has forced me to reassess my life in terms of: what do I do compulsively because of a protocol someone has devised to make 'things run smoothly,' and what do I do because I get a deep sense of satisfaction, because doing such things is a part of who I am?

As for the 'free will' issue, I don't think it's a contradiction that you choose which emotional states you like to embody and that others will influence what emotional state you are currently in. Something as simple as ignoring someone who is excessively hostile or proud makes it less likely that they will continue to interact with you, and simply by not focusing your attention on them you have made a choice to reject that emotional state. The reason I speak of 'focusing attention' rather than making choices is that most of the time the choices we have and the paths we can follow are laid out in front of us by life, and what a 'choice' really amounts to is an analysis of which path will lead us to our preferred emotional state. So again, the choice is in what you want to be, how you want to feel, which relates back to who you already are, and how you are comfortable feeling. The reason a lot of this seems contradictory is because it relies on feedback loops, a person doesn't redefine themselves with every choice they make, they reaffirm who they already are or make gradual, subtle changes. Most of what we do is rather automatic, so it is more an issue of focusing in on a 'mode' of existence.

Finally, I do not believe certain modes of thinking are more objective than others. Certain modes of thinking simply constrain themselves to the surface of things, to phenomena of language. That's fine, but ultimately rather unfulfilling/boring.

since post-modernism was brought up...

baudrillard, simulacra and simulation




The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models — and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials — worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.

this is probably my favorite... melancholy and fascination...

baudrillard, on nihilism
Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulations - XVIII. On Nihilism

and of course the classic,
derrida, differance

Differance

i started a blawg, the link is in my signature, i think people could find something beneficial in it

The Future of Man, Teilhard de Chardin

It is a matter of common experience that within restricted groups (the pair, the team) unity, far from diminishing the individual, enhances, enriches and liberates him in terms of himself. True union, the union of heart and spirit, does not enslave, nor does it neutralize the individuals which it brings together. It superpersonalizes them. Let us try to picture the phenomenon on a terrestrial scale. Imagine men awakening at last, under the influence of the ever-tightening planetary embrace, to a sense of universal solidarity based on their profound community, evolutionary in its nature and purpose. The nightmares of brutalization and mechanization which are conjured up to terrify us and prevent our advance are at once dispelled. It is not harshness or hatred but a new kind of love, not yet experienced by man, which we must learn to look for as it is borne to us on the rising tide of planetization.

Reflecting, even briefly, on the state of affairs which might evoke this universal love in the human heart, a love so often vainly dreamed of, but which now leaves the fields of Utopia to reveal itself as both possible and necessary, we are brought to the following conclusion: that for men upon earth, all the earth, to learn to love on another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of on and the same thing; in "planetizing" themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same person. For (and this is writ large in the Gospel) there is no total love that does not proceed from, and exist within, that which is personal.

And what does this mean except, finally, that the planetization of Mankind, if it is to come properly into effect, presupposes, in addition to the enclosing Earth, and to the organization and condensation of human thought, yet another factor? I mean the rise on our inward horizon of a cosmic spiritual center, a supreme pole of consciousness, upon which all the separate consciousnesses of the world may converge and within which they may love on another: the rise of a God.

It is here that reason may discern, conforming to and in harmony with the law of complexity, an acceptable way of envisaging "the end of the world."

(The law of complexity states, loosely, that there is a drive present in the Universe to crystallize and organize opposed to the tendency of entropy to disperse elements.)

tractatus logico-philosophicus, wittgenstein

6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

6.4312 Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle in space and time lies outside space and time.
(It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required.)

6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

Mary Moody Emerson to Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You most beloved of ministers, who seemed formed by face, manner & pen to copy & illustrate the noblest of all institutions, are you at war with that angelic office?... Now if this withering Lucifer doctrine of pantheism be true, what moral truth can you preach or by what authority should you feel it? Without a personal God you are on an ocean mast unrigged for any port or object."

This quotation raises several important points. The first is the specific relation of pantheism to Christianity, whether the two are mutually exclusive--pantheism reflecting the pride of Satan and an overestimation of the ego, where Christianity works to instill a sense of worthlessness--you were made from nothing after all, or, if perhaps pantheism is simply a deeper understanding of Christianity which is hidden from all but a few--"the kingdom of Heaven is within," "I am in God and He is in me"... For one thing this tension calls attention to the essential ambiguity of scripture, and its openness to interpretation. One could also argue that perhaps the different authors of the Bible had different spiritual views, and hence this dichotomy tends to be glossed over by the assumed continuity of the Bible.

There are pressing problems on both sides of this divide. Taking God as the Ultimate Other, the self-sustaining and self-moving, with pure being-for-self, and this corporeal universe as the nothingness set in motion by Its whim, how does one account for our 'ability' to sense Its presence? Is this even a personal God? After all, the idea of a 'personal' entity seems to derive to some extent from familial relations. One has to add a third term to the mind-body dualism, namely the soul, because if one can have a sensory experience of God, or fully understand God with the mind, this quickly succombs to pantheism since God would be nothing but the fullest expression of the mind and body. With the soul, we have an additional agency which is like God (made in His image) but which can only strive toward God, perhaps never reaching Him. In addition, part of this striving toward perfection involves rejecting the temptation of both mind and body. Again, however, pantheism looms. It would seem that the soul, being eternal, is only subject to diversity insofar as it experiences through the body and mind. Hence, though various souls might be on various stages toward perfection, in various bodies, without the diversity of the senses and perspectives, this can easily be interpreted as one soul diffracted through time and space. And, once this is admitted, God is again nothing more than the fullest expression of the soul, which, even if it seems to be infinitely removed from any particular stage, could simply be taken to be the essence of the soul outside space and time. And if we try to undo this by making God entirely unlike the soul, as Other as possible, the only route to God would be purely negative--ecstacy and the sublime would merely be distractions on the road to complete self-renunciation and a recognition of the nothingness of even the soul. Does Christianity offer such a radical perspective? Who would write it, and why?

Another important issue is the 'baselessness' of pantheism. After all, if everything is a part and expression of God, then not only is God good and evil, but everything He does He does merely to Himself. What basis, then, is there for ethical behavior? Hegel resolves this dilemma dialectically, Good can be taken as the positive (thesis) (analogous to being) and Evil as the negative (antithesis) (analogous to non-being) and as they play out their struggle Good ultimately prevails, that is to say, diversity collapses back into unity. The ethical standard, then, is to promote unity. However, as soon as this view has been systematized, it is easy to see how it succombs to tautology and absurdity. After all, it seems to say that the point of existence is for Spirit to become One (and stop torturing itself) but why then did Spirit ever cease to be One in the first place? It is a cyclical game which continues precisely because it never manages to justify itself, and must always flee from this justification. Fortunately, we do not experience this unfolding in purely rational terms. We experience it emotionally--we feel bliss in the union of lovers or tones or colors or forms, we feel horror and repulsion in the negative movement of decay and torture, we even bring ourselves to laugh in the face of the Absurd. Even if it is the same old story, even if it becomes more predictable and mundane as the cycle nears its end, we yearn with all our being for those few, fleeting moments of ecstacy and rebel with every ounce of our being in the face of Death.

Because the 'rational' dialectical movement is experienced subjectively, pantheism does give us a personal God, not one who sits beyond the world as its creator, but one who sits in the world, in our intersubjective relations, as the very epitome of their becoming. Further, he is personal because he is both terrible and wonderful, and makes no (impossible?) promises of eternal bliss. Rather, he is one who teaches us how to live, how to balance, and how to play. The Other God, the one who would lead us out of this world into Heaven, can only do so by teaching us how to die to this world. Both options strike the mind as paradoxical, but the Hegelian notion presents the paradox as that of the mind, whereas the latter aims at the dissolution of the mind altogether--He is ineffable, beyond comprehension.

The lack of justification for Spirit becomes clear in Idealism, for, just as we feel pressed to point beyond ourselves for justification for our actions, so too does Spirit seem incapable of justifying the cruel master/slave game it plays with itself. However, by positing an utterly transcendent God, we have not resolved this issue, we have merely deferred it. If our aim is to become like God, why did God create us unlike Himself? Why did He create us at all? The orthodox answer is that we cannot understand the will of God, but if we cannot do this, then he cannot be a personal God.

The dichotomy can be expressed in many different ways: Buddhism vs Hinduism (exiting samsara through nirvana vs realizing your inner God), Schopenhauer vs Nietzsche (renunciation of will vs will to power), etc. When crystallized, I cannot help but think that Christianity is hiding this issue, presenting an elaborate self-deception, rather than offering a clear answer. For now, I will side with Emerson, Nietzsche, William Blake, Hegel (sort of) and even Camus to an extent, and answer that though the game Spirit plays is absurd, it is precisely that, a game. It does not need any justification beyond itself, and in turn, neither do we.

Something lingers that we cannot yet grasp, and it's still out there. Or maybe we did find it, but nobody was paying attention. **** happens.

Christianity does not work to instill a sense of worthlessness. God creates out of nothing, it is difficult to understand, but the emphasis should not be placed on the "nothing." The emphasis should be place on the "made." God creates and sustains whatever He creates. God knows everything and there is nothing that can exist that God does not know. Therefore is no person that exist that God does not know, that God does gives life to, that God sustain his/her life. It is in the fact that God "made" (created) human life, is where a person gets his/her dignity.

and where does God get His dignity? would He have any without us giving it to Him? the fact that you took that quote out of context to respond to it hints to me that you're not really following my train of thought and your post doesn't really say anything to me, just the same old deference. maybe that's the point.

I didn't use your name or mention "you" said this or that, so I didn't take it out of context, where I accused you of saying something you didn't intend to say.

Slavoj Zizek <3 I haven't really dived that deep into his philosophical stuff but he's, politically, a genius.

when it comes to pure theory he's a genius too ... and he's freakin hilarious!

ha, foucault is so expressive and emotive in his responses but his points aren't as well thought out as those made by chomsky, who ironically sounds like a robot. if only we could combine them into one superbeing...

some more of this

a lot of people argue relativism/perspectivism is self-contradictory, so here's a fun formulation of relativism i came up with to get around that:

the only absolute truth is that this is the only absolute truth

here's some more zizek to keep you on your toes, i love this paper:
Slavoj Zizek

God is absolute truth because there is no truth greater than God.

So the only absolute truth is that there is a God.

...


that post does not in any way open up a space for debate, nor does it mean anything to me, so i'm incredibly perplexed as to why you felt the need to post it. i think we both know where you stand, but that's obviously not the sort of thing that's going to help bring me over to your side. so...

...?

a more interesting thing to hear from you would be: where are you getting these ideas from? have you personally experienced God? if so, under what circumstances and what was it like?

That sounds like something Alan Watts would say. Like some kind of Westernized Zen.
Speaking of which - I wish there was some more discussion of the man over in his thread. I've been reading his writing for months now and I'm interested to hear more about what people (in the know) think about him.