How To Tell Right From Wrong

[Obvious Leo]

Hobbes. Believe it or not I actually managed to glean some meaning out of your carefully crafted piss-take and by and large I agree with it. Naturally Kant observed the honourable German practice of ensuring that his philosophy was unreadable but Manny would be delighted to see that those who are now interpreting his thoughts a couple of centuries later are continuing to respect this tradition. Could I roughly translate your erudition to mean that Gustav is a wind-bag?

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Hobbes. Believe it or not I actually managed to glean some meaning out of your carefully crafted piss-take and by and large I agree with it. Naturally Kant observed the honourable German practice of ensuring that his philosophy was unreadable but Manny would be delighted to see that those who are now interpreting his thoughts a couple of centuries later are continuing to respect this tradition. Could I roughly translate your erudition to mean that Gustav is a wind-bag?

But do you think it's really a piss-take? I don't think Hobbes is that clever.

[Obvious Leo]

But do you think it's really a piss-take?

I'm pretty sure it is because I had in mind to try my hand at something similar. Anybody with the right language skills can spew out a lot of important sounding bullshit to express some basic common sense ideas which could be expressed in a far simpler form of language. This is basically what Hobbes did and he made a pretty good job of it. He should consider a career in the law or politics because there are plenty of opportunities there to keep one's snout in the public trough indefinitely as long as one can maintain a steady stream of such talk. The content is irrelevant, VT, because it's all about the showbiz.

I don't think Hobbes is that clever.

Don't let him fool you just because he's an arsehole with no manners. He's smarter than the average bear.

[Hobbes' Choice]

I like mine better ...

You would because you are so narcissistic that you could not be bothered to read anyone else's writing.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Don't let him fool you just because he's an arsehole with no manners. He's smarter than the average bear.

I'm not convinced. He was being serious, I'm sure of it. Satire is beyond him.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

At that level of afflicted intelligence I am not sure that qualifiers such as 'serious' and 'satirical' are what we should focus on. His devastating placement of 'Gustav is a windbag', and its strategic repetition, points up a prodigious hard to contain genius. His domination of kantspeak is quite secondary. He is a shining star here at PN, but that should not be taken to mean that others who have written here recently are not worthy stars too. Rather, one notices and is cowed down by a firmament of devastating brilliancy. Philosophy of the highest order!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

The problem is, with all of your strict 'rules' about life, you are unable to relax and enjoy.

As the topic, supposedly! is right and wrong by Christian standards, it is interesting to examine what we mean when we say 'to relax and enjoy'. One does not at all sense, if one considers the mission of Jesus, that it has much at all to do with relaxation and enjoyment. To say this is fairly obvious, of course. The story of Jesus and his descent to the earth is one of ultramission. It has to do with ultimate rectification of a tragic problem. Philosophically, religiously, cosmologically, and no matter how one thinks of Christianity - one can take it all solely as a Grand Story - all the aspects of the narrative point only to seriousness, extreme seriousness, where 'relaxation and enjoyment' are not part of it.

In Eastern religions - Buddhism and the Vedic religious forms - the essential philosophical and ethical message is one that takes account of the alluring dangers of sensuality, hedonism, and there is a quite sophisticated appreciation of a psychology that understands man as a creature driven to seek pleasure 'on the outer surfaces of the body', as it is explained, and in tremendous detail. The science of yoga is an internalization of focus on inner levels of consciousness. And in these philosophies it is precisely 'intelligence' that gains the understanding that it is pleasure and pleasure-seeking that is a source of suffering. The same is true in Medieval philosophy, which has much in common with the antique metaphysical schools of the East. They are diagrammatical explanations of cosmological understanding.

One thing quite interesting about our Present is the degree in which there has been carried out a drastic and dramatic shift from, shall we say, 'duty' and self-negation, to that of a new definition of life itself and its value as a venue for pleasure-seeking. This represents a giant shift from one ethical pole to another ethical pole. We hardly think in terms of self-negation now, we think in terms of how to get the most pleasure possible, and all systems in society gear up to provide and purvey pleasure of that order.

Ideas have consequences, naturally. A return to 'life in the body' from, say, a life in mind or 'life in the spirit', results in a whole landscape of difference in culture, in cultural products (art, music, literature, and certainly how love and affection are defined and how their possibilities are understood, etc.) and a quite radical redefinition of society and the aims of civilization.

Like it or not, Christian life, and most of the religious-ethical practices, offer an incentive, as it were, or a moral challenge, to negate mere physical/sensual activity so to focus on 'higher' activity. The destruction of the Christian ethic as an operative one in our societies, the undermining of the 'cosmological metaphysics' that supports it, and the linking-up of our very existence here with pleasure-seeking and all that is attached to that (forms of materialism as it is generally called), is a major element in our present, and a major event in occidental civilisation. Obviously, there are enormous polemics as to what this means, where it tends, what the end will be ...

Too, the notion of 'relaxation and enjoyment' is important to consider because the definition of it has so many levels. There are indeed higher levels of pleasure - much higher - in a rigorously defined and rigorously lived life. As we destroy a set of metaphysical definitions we seem - I mean 'many people' or 'people in general' - to lose out: we get stuck and trapped at a sensual level because the culture, generally, cannot any longer appreciate (define) pleasure of a higher, moral order. The whole societal order - mercantile, entertainment industry, the 'culture industry' to refer to a left critique - comes to focus and to value lower orders of pleasure, the visceral and the tactile.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I take it, you are more likely to follow the old testament God rather than the new testament Jesus.

I am more inclined to reject both actually. But when I am considering Christianity - what it is, what it claims, what it desires, what it rejects, and of course why - I think that one has to reason from within the system. And too, as I have said, there is no way to disassociate ourselves from our enmeshment in Christian ideas, and all of our occidental history, which is permeated by Christianity, through-and-through. If you mean why I would define a position lacking admiration for 'democracy', or why I would define a position of 'pro-masculinity', and why I would define a philosophical stance that is 'anti-homosexual', I would say that no one of my positions in these matters has anything to do with the Christian religion, neither the Old of the New Testament. But it would be capable of taking account of why - in the case of homosexuality anyway - there is opposition to it within the defined religious structure. Homosexuality is a very tricky one to navigate though. My opposition to homosexuality is not to the form of it that has and will always exist, but rather when a culture becomes indoctrinated in homosexual currents through public relations/propaganda manipulation. I also tend to respect traditional 'sciences' such as yoga, taoism, etc., that caution against improper use of sexuality. But that functions both heterosexually and homosexually, IMO.

I am of the opinion that when considering 'religion' one has to see through any and all specific form and to understand the Ideas that are operating there. I have used the word 'cosmology' frequently to indicate that a religious structure is a statement about cosmology: the nature of reality, what is man, what is this place, what does it require, and so much else. In one way or another, then, now, and in the future, these questions are asked and will be asked. They require an answer. Obviously, I do not reject religion however I certainly agree that there is such a thing as delirium and madness. What concerns me, what interests me, is how man arrives at and defines 'a metaphysical dream of the world'. I assume that all creatures in this universe and in all universes deal on this topic. I assume a universal metaphysic, at least as an abstract principle. So, with that idea, I would be able to say that all conscious creatures will come into relationship cosmologically with 'reality'. And out of that arises man's religiosity: a total response to his understanding of his place and his condition. There is no alternative.

I notice that we modern creatures, we creatures of the post-industrial revolution, we of the so-called modern consumer society - a unique and very new sort of man in a unique and new technostructure - are involved, very acutely, and very obviously, in a religious definition (as I define it, a bit differently perhaps yet still). 'The World' offers a View, a way of being, a way of relating, a way of understanding this existence. It defines praxis. In a very real sense it controls and defines all of this, and more thoroughly (perhaps) than any previous religious structure. It really does offer a drastic, an all-encompassing, a determining metaphysic. To understand this requires a good deal of work.

The Traditionalism I spoke of you likely misunderstood. I am speaking of people like Rene Guenon and Julius Evola, among numerous others. Their views are in many respects transcendental to any traditional biblical exegesis, which they at least would consider somewhat absurd by any measure, but not irrelevant. My personal interest extends back to pre-Christian roots and to pan-Aryanism: Indo-European Aryanism, Indo-Aryanism, and those cultural current that originated in Southern Siberia.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

But leaving it there would mean that you were living a lie. I understand that the religiously minded tend to live in a network of delusions, and you are no exception, it seems. But the point of "Philosophy Now" is not merely to outworking of opinions and delusions, but a thorough discussion about how and why such delusions are generated and to what degree we can challenge ourselves.

I have found that it is really quite hard to assign labels as to who does and who does not 'live lies' or in 'delusions'. I have also noted that when people assume that they handle Real or Supreme Truths that they also feel they can define delusion, lies (of the sort you mean), and much else. There is a modern current of thinking (philosophical or pseudo-philosophical depending in how one viewed it) that feels it can make some of these ultimate assessments, and of course it does just that. There is a wider, social movement - a sort of cultural activism - where these ideas (sometimes pretty half-baked) are presented and taken up by followers.

It is pretty obvious that you are in another category though. A stunning and intense and powerful mind which has penetrated down into the substructure and can now reveal 'lie' and 'delusion'.

I see these questions somewhat differently, overall. I have a great deal of suspicion of 'mere' mental organisation - the construction and maintenance of elaborate idea-systems (machines) in our minds. Idea has to function holistically, in the full person, on all levels. Idea has to bring us into relationship with ourselves, with the people we are close to, and also with higher projects, cultural and social projects of course.

To define who lives truly or self-deceivingly in these areas is really very hard to do. You could of course organise all your rap into a beautiful machine-like rehearsal ... and still be somewhat of a mess.

Based on what I have noticed here - generally and so far - I don't see the sort of philosophical work going on here that I can really admire. I see spitting, bellicose folk playing philosophical games with each other. It always reminds me of a Samuel Beckett story ('How It Is'), a sort of philo-conversational-interpersonal hell.
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• you are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it’s over you are there no more alive no more then again you are there again alive again it wasn’t over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark
  
  the same as which which place it’s not said or I don’t hear it’s one or the other the same more or less more humid fewer gleams no gleam what does that mean that I was once somewhere where there were gleams I say it as I hear it every word always
  
  more hurmid fewer gleams no gleam and hushed the dear sounds pretext for speculation I must have slipped you are m the depths it’s the end you have ceased you slip you continue
  
  another age yet another familiar in spite of its strangenesses this sack this slime the mild air the black dark the coloured images the power to crawl all these strangenesses
  
  but progress properly so called ruins in prospect as in the dear tenth century the dear twentieth that you might say to yourself to a dream greenhorn ah if you had seen it four hundred years ago what upheavals

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Etc. etc.

[Hobbes' Choice]

A delusion is a belief which cannot be supported evidentially or rationally. It's not hard to identify them.

You have shown that you maintain a selection of such beliefs. I suggest you take the advice of Ludwig. W.

" Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", Wittgenstein.

Believe nothing: seek to know.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Most religious systems or conceptions involve forms of mysticism. Mysticism is a sense of relationship to the cosmos that has produced the living entity. Your privileged 'evidence' and 'rationality' are recent arrivals which have use and function in different areas. To define (to know) one's relationship to existence requires the use of different parts of ourself. In no sense should this nor does this diminish the significance of rationality, or rational method, nor evidence, but one has to separate the tool from the application. This is such basic stuff, Hobbles.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Most religious systems or conceptions involve forms of mysticism. Mysticism is a sense of relationship to the cosmos that has produced the living entity. Your privileged 'evidence' and 'rationality' are recent arrivals which have use and function in different areas. To define (to know) one's relationship to existence requires the use of different parts of ourself. In no sense should this nor does this diminish the significance of rationality, or rational method, nor evidence, but one has to separate the tool from the application. This is such basic stuff, Hobbles.

Yes, basic delusion.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Your assertion has to do with 'delusion'. In your concept there is no way (it is non-rational and illogical, etc.) that a human being have a mystical, or interior/subjective, relationship with his very platform of being, the cosmos that has produced him. Were someone to suggest (even if they knew it 'silently') that they have such a relationship, live in it, think and feel from it, you assert that this is 'delusion'. The declaration is clear. Quo warranto?

I reverse it and suggest that your assertion may be a delusion, and thus the delusion is yours.

Can one have 'relationship' to another being, Hobbles? Can one think/feel one's relatedness to another, as in love? in friendship?

[Hobbes' Choice]

Your assertion has to do with 'delusion'. In your concept there is no way (it is non-rational and illogical, etc.) that a human being have a mystical, or interior/subjective, relationship with his very platform of being, the cosmos that has produced him. Were someone to suggest (even if they knew it 'silently') that they have such a relationship, live in it, think and feel from it, you assert that this is 'delusion'. The declaration is clear. Quo warranto?

I reverse it and suggest that your assertion may be a delusion, and thus the delusion is yours.

Can one have 'relationship' to another being, Hobbles? Can one think/feel one's relatedness to another, as in love? in friendship?

Perception of the world is certainly subjective. But mystical?? Why?
Knowledge is the only good, and is not derived from subjectivity. Knowledge requires work. Knowledge derives from comparisons with other's subjective perceptions, and agreements reached with others provide the objective ground for true knowledge about the world we live in.
Inward looking "mysticism" whatever that is, is indistinguishable from fantasy and imagination.
You have no warrant to reverse the assertion.
What I allow myself is demonstrable and replicable.
I have no care or interest in your internal world, as it appears the meanderings of a mad-man.

[Obvious Leo]

I have no care or interest in your internal world, as it appears the meanderings of a mad-man.

This was very much the Pauline legacy. Saul was at once a paranoid schizophrenic, a misogynist and a sado-masochist but he was a gifted orator with a compelling personal presence and subtle geopolitical smarts. Schizophrenics were both revered and feared in the Roman world and Saul was able to use the gruesome execution of Christ to his advantage. He was able to re-brand Christ's simple message of redemption through forgiveness and change it into a message of redemption through suffering. This self-humiliation was to be the public face of Christianity while the true spirituality of the Christian experience was to be achieved through a personal communion with god himself. Such symptoms are commonplace with this unfortunate disease. Many perfectly healthy people talk to god but god only talks back to those afflicted by this very psychopathology. Indeed schizophrenics have been both revered and feared throughout the Christian world for two millennia for precisely this reason.