Skepdick wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:49 am
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Wed Apr 08, 2020 6:50 am
As an extreme Platonic realist I believe that Good and Evil are real things, independent of human beings. If all human beings suddenly disappeared Good and Evil would still exist. Not only that, but so would error and deception and illusion and untruth. So would everything that enters the mind of man. Man creates nothing, nothing at all. You give too much power to the mind of man.
If I am to wear your exact hat (Platonic realism) and agree to everything you say , I can make a trivial counter-argument by taking the opposite stance on your final point.
You give too little power to the mind of man.
I have no problem with the premise "reality exists independent of the human mind", but I feel it necessary to point out that it's a trivial truth - there's more to it: All knowledge about the mind-independent reality is a social and human construction. This is the view of
constructive epistemology. All that we call knowledge is man-made.
Knowledge is power (they say). If we have any knowledge of Good and Evil, error and deception, illusion and untruth, then we have power. Once we recognise our own power then we begin to question God's identity. Is God just a Platonic form of ourselves?
Platonism. Realism, And how it differs from anti-realism. It a question about universal Forms. The Forms. What is a Form?
To deal with the Forms is to deal with pure accident. They are simple and have no definition that works. Take the Forms of a City and an Airport. You vaguely know what they are. So now here you are a traveler. You arrive at your destination. The plane is crowded and people are jockeying to get their stuff and get off the plane. It’s a mess and you are tired. Where is this and where is that. Eventually you are walking out onto the gangway. You make it. Now you have to find your way through an airport you don’t know. You have to make connections and if it is not your final destination you have to find out where you wait. It’s hectic. All so you can get at a strange city where you will again have to figure it all out as you go along. You are in Unknowing. One step at a time until you figure it out in your tiredness and body aches.
In Platonism, the universal Form is separate from the particular that exemplifies it. And the generic Form is different from the specific Forms that it might take. You know City and Airport, but this city and this airport could be anything. It is pure accident what that will be. All you know for sure is you will encounter That, whatever it is. The bare particular and the bare Form are just right there and you have encountered Them. Deal with it. everything is pure accident.
It’s like sex. You find yourself at night in a strange apartment with a person you don’t know. You have to manage. And reach orgasm. A lot of repetition and move here, move there, try this, try that. Eventually you will reach the peak and come. Then after a few moments rest you make your way home in the dark.
I remember when I was young in the 1960s I often had no place of my own and every night I would have to find a place to crash. And something to eat. Somehow I managed. It wasn’t always legal, but I managed. One step at a time. Everything was pure accident. There was no knowing where or what. On the battle fields of Vietnam, it was the same. Boys trying to stay alive in the jungle. You just keep going until you arrive somewhere. They you have to figure that out and head out again. And you are tired. There is always That, the bare That.
And now I have to maneuver my way around Kathmandu, a big, dirty chaotic city. Even when I go on the buses to a place I know I never know what I am going to have to work my way around and through. I love it. everything is pure accident. And the boys are so very sexy. And the food is never something I can eat. I so long for a McDonalds and a quarter-pounder.
For a lot of my life I worked in catering. Moving things from here to there. Always in some unknown location. If you know catering you know that nothing ever goes according to plan. And something always breaks or isn’t right or you forgot something. You have to think of something and make it work. Again, everything is pure accident. And you deal with it. And of course smile. Loading and unloading the truck was usually a matter of throwing something.
Science deals in facts. The world is all that is the case, said Wittgenstein. A fact is made out of ontological things. For example if I say that that is a red sphere, then there are the things named by the words “that”, “is”, “red” and “sphere”. A realist says those things exist external to the mind and together they make the fact that that is a red sphere. A Nominalist will say that the fact is the primary existing thing and those “things” are just words (nomina) and they name abstracted concepts formed by the mind. Concepts are not real existing things, he says.
So here I am, a Realist. I can grasp the ontological things that compose the fact. I can think the bare this, the bare is, the bare red and the bare sphere (or spherical). The notion of bareness is essential. What is bareness?
Let’s say you are walking and you encounter an obstacle blocking you path. It’s a difficult path through brush, across brambled ravines, into swampy land. You are having a hard time of it. And at each turn there is a surprise. Here is another. A Thing is blocking your way. There is That. The bare That you cannot comprehend. How to deal with it? It is just That.
Often in life we encounter such a presence. Maybe an illness (coronavirus) or a debt or a job loss or being abandoned by a lover. There is That. You cannot think it out of existence. It is nauseating. It makes your head ache. There’s nothing you can say.
Now think of the universal Form of Red. Many many things exemplify that. Again it is a That Thing. Today some try to change it into quantifiable electromatic waves that can be easily handled by mathematics and understood, but such a transrormation finally doesn’t work. Red remains just the color Red. You are stuck with it. It just is. There is no understanding of it. And the same thinking goes for the universal Form Spherical. It just is. And you don’t understand why it is or what it is. You are stuck with it.
So now I am writing up my idea, but the idea is definitely not definite and well-defined. I write one sentence and then another. I’ll know when I’m done. And then I’ll go back to bed. And dream my crazy dreams.
Here on this forum, many want only to deal with the well-defined so they give me excerpts from some philosophical dictionary. They so long for something steady to hang onto. It never works. The Forms cannot be defined. We are all walking in the dark and making thing up as we go along. I bring up God, the least defined, the most knock-about head-banger thing there is. God is Pure Accident Itself. Just That. Deal with it. then people ask me to define my terms. Which is like trying to follow instructions in sex. It’s not going to work. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there.
That is Existentialism. It is Roquetin standing there, encountering the chestnut tree in the book
Nausea. It is you becoming nauseated as you watch a shaman. Magic is without understanding. It is from the realm of pure chance. It is just That. Everything is bare.
So have I written anything understandable here? No, I just wrote what came to me as I walked in the dark through a wasteland. Pure chance was everywhere. And magic, so far from nice clean scientific fact.
Ontological Things exist and that existence is the dark core at their center. So people try to mathematicize the Thing and get rid of the darkness in the pure Light of mathematical analyticity. They try to get rid of existence, maybe a la Buddhism. And make it a mere concept, nothing at all. But I don’t. I love existence and dark Ontological Things that are just There. Dasein.