Philosophy Now Forum

Walker wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:55 pm

Harbal, someone should tell you, you have to up your game if you want to be a philosopher.

I don't want to be a philosopher, and my game is perfectly adequate for what I do want to be, which is one who draws attention to stupidity. So, if you don't like being in the spotlight, stop being stupid.

Harbal the Magnificent writes: I don't want to be a philosopher, and my game is perfectly adequate for what I do want to be, which is one who draws attention to stupidity.

The word you are looking for is not stupidity but nescience. You are not stupid by any means. What defines you is nescience.

[Late Latin nescientia, from Latin nesciēns, nescient-, present participle of nescīre, to be ignorant : ne-, not; see ne in Indo-European roots + scīre, to know; see skei- in Indo-European roots.]

The root is interesting: skei- to cut, split.

Think of Iambiguous who defines himself as ever-fracturing, as one who loses his center, and splits into personal powerlessness.

Walker wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:43 pm

Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:40 pm

Walker wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:30 pm Then, care for others. That is an aspect of Christianity. It's the philosophy that empowers the actions of a Christian. Care for others.

Decent people care for others, it has nothing to do with having a religion. Not all Christians are decent people, and some are downright twats, just like any other random bunch of people.

Therefore, Christians are decent people, because caring for others is an aspect of Christianity.

They should be treated accordingly, and not persecuted.

This issue needs to be given a closer examination. What is at stake needs to be better understood through being better seen.

You can begin to make some statements and these help clarify the question:

If American Christianity is considered there are 5-6 different innovative American versions. Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Pentecostals, and then various strains of Evangelicals, Non-denominationalists and then Catholics. The Catholics need to be divided into post-Vatican ll and then the Traditional Catholics whose rigidity is not appreciated by the present pope and the liberal Catholic structure.

(By *innovative* I mean strange American inventions. Christianity was reinvented in the American context by those of the first group.)

Yet getting down to a sort of 'bedrock' and a core definition of what a Christian is -- that can sort of be done but it has problematic aspects. Immanuel all the time wants to define this irreducible bedrock Christianity. But he is in conflict with other branches of Christianity which he considers heretic (though he does not use that word).

Harbal, because he operates at a level without any points of reference, without any knowledge-base at all, can say...

Decent people care for others, it has nothing to do with having a religion. Not all Christians are decent people, and some are downright twats, just like any other random bunch of people.

...while simultaneously failing to understand that there is such a thing as a Christian culture that is European through-and-through. It is that culture that made the Christian even if, as Immanuel might point out, that Christian is not the sort of ultra-dedicated Christian that Immanuel tells us he is (a true Christian). Manners, ethics, social conduct, relationships and marraige -- all of these have been formed essentially through centuries of Christian influence.

Decent people have to be created. And the process of creating a culture of decent people required centuries of education and training. People are not simple 'decent'. They are decent because they are raised in decent society that puts tremendous pressure on them and also defines strict limits.

True, with the destruction of Christian belief and Christian culture people fall away from traditional ethics because they are no longer directly educated in these. And what happens then? What happens is what we see happening around us. Social breakdown, social divisions, conflicts that cannot be bridged, lack of good social ethics and behavior, rudeness, aggression, and then lawlessness. Christian religion had provided cohesiveness and when it dissolves so too do those ethical limits that it established.

Christianity when it is studied (its historical roots, etc.) is seen to be a repository of knowledge and also values. Those advanced in theology were also well-versed in general philosophy, the Greek classics and literacy generally. Without a center of coalescence and a comprehensible social theory and indeed a *Christian anthropology* that center dissolves away. And the individual that arises in that milieu is as we notice today: separated from social context and continuity. Uncomprehending of history. Illiterate. But whose attention and 'life' is in the hands of the corporations that purvey what he sees and hears and which comes at him from all angles, as a constant barrage. That man no longer possesses himself but is possessed by a range of powers, factions and entities that he is unaware of and cannot see. That men then becomes a "product" that is produced but is not informed by all that which at one time was understood to be of a high category.

As I have been trying to say that man devolves. To what could he raise himself up? There is no up. The horizontal, the mutable and the contingent becomes his *world*.

You see when you take it to its furthest point you then have, right in front of you, a man who looks remarkably like Harbal. This is not his fault though. Or it is not his fault until he becomes aware that he really does have responsibility and also agency which he cannot and must not squander. But to speak in terms of *must nots* and *cannots* implies a structure of values and ideas that must be recovered and accentuated again.

So the true facts really do imply that the loss of this informed conscious man -- a man with spiritual and moral agency -- will result in the breaking apart of civil society as we had understood it. We see the evidence of this. We are aware that it is happening. But the forces driving it are way too powerful.

It is in this context that we are in *ideological wars*.

I will always opt to support Christians and Christianity when what opposes it, and what results from its demise, is so obviously manifest.

And it is still better to grasp the metaphysical values that are at stake and which stand behind Christianity and Occidental culture rather than being a slavish member of some congregation and incapable of self-actuating thought.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 7:46 pm

Harbal the Magnificent writes: I don't want to be a philosopher, and my game is perfectly adequate for what I do want to be, which is one who draws attention to stupidity.

The word you are looking for is not stupidity but nescience. You are not stupid by any means. What defines you is nescience.

Yes, I know I'm not stupid, and one of my interests on this forum is identifying and pointing out stupidity in others. You are always bleating on about what you consider to be undesirable elements in society, well I am concerned about the amount of stupidity in society. As for nescience, well that's just a judgement you've made about me, and I can't be bothered to defend myself against it.

The root is interesting: skei- to cut, split....

I'm afraid I don't share your interest, so could you pursue it in your own time without involving me.

Think of Iambiguous who defines himself as ever-fracturing, as one who loses his center, and splits into personal powerlessness.

I don't want to think of it, as melodrama is another thing that doesn't interest me.

Harbal, because he operates at a level without any points of reference, without any knowledge-base at all, can say...

Arranging it so I can get away with saying pretty much anything I want to is something I have put more effort into than you probably realise, Alexis.

Decent people have to be created. And the process of creating a culture of decent people required centuries of education and training. People are not simple 'decent'. They are decent because they are raised in decent society that puts tremendous pressure on them and also defines strict limits.

Well perhaps you are the one who needs to go back to the drawing board, Alexis, because decent people don't try to manipulate those around them in order to achieve their own goals.

True, with the destruction of Christian belief and Christian culture people fall away from traditional ethics because they are no longer directly educated in these. And what happens then? What happens is what we see happening around us. Social breakdown, social divisions, conflicts that cannot be bridged, lack of good social ethics and behavior, rudeness, aggression, and then lawlessness. Christian religion had provided cohesiveness and when it dissolves so too do those ethical limits that it established.

I don't really know you, but from the impression you leave me with on this forum, I would happily put my -non-Christian- ethics up for scrutiny against yours.

Decent people have to be created. And the process of creating a culture of decent people required centuries of education and training. People are not simple 'decent'. They are decent because they are raised in decent society that puts tremendous pressure on them and also defines strict limits.

Well perhaps you are the one who needs to go back to the drawing board, Alexis, because descent people don't try to manipulate those around them in order to achieve their own goals.

If decency is a good thing, then why would people need to be pressured into it?

And if it's not a good thing, then why would people want it?

Walker to Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:30 pm Then, care for others. That is an aspect of Christianity.

There are lots of wonderful human aspects that people channel through their endeavors.

Walker to Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 5:30 pm It's what enables Christians to power through depression.

There are lots of ways to power through depression. Some people don't get depressed.

None of this has anything uniquely to do with being Christian, so it's noticeably odd that you seem to try to make it so.

phyllo wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 9:35 pm

Decent people have to be created. And the process of creating a culture of decent people required centuries of education and training. People are not simple 'decent'. They are decent because they are raised in decent society that puts tremendous pressure on them and also defines strict limits.

Well perhaps you are the one who needs to go back to the drawing board, Alexis, because descent people don't try to manipulate those around them in order to achieve their own goals.

If decency is a good thing, then why would people need to be pressured into it?

And if it's not a good thing, then why would people want it?

See the second essay in Genealogy of Morals.

To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn't that the real problem of human beings? The fact that this problem has largely been resolved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense.

Precisely that development is the history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal with a right to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more urgent prior task of making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among many other like him, regular and consequently predictable. The immense task in what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak, p. 7, 13, 16), the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny, monotony and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of custom and the social strait jacket, the human being was rendered truly predictable.

Now, let's position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree finally yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means. We find—as the ripest fruit on that tree—the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom—the autonomous individual beyond morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive terms)—in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises—and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved and given living embodiment in him: a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.

- woops -

Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 9:09 pm Yes, I know I'm not stupid, and one of my interests on this forum is identifying and pointing out stupidity in others.

You are in no sense qualified to make those assessments, m'boy. You struggle with the most basic things because, as it seems, thinking things through is so new for you.

In my own case (since I do not think most people, and certainly not those who write here, are stupid (mentally deficient) I find it more productive to try and figure out how arrived at their quarter- or half-formed state. I mean a really incomplete knowledge-base. Even in the most basic categories. That is why I am always trying to show that you, Harbal, are an historical outcome. You are a *product* of a cultural decline. Just as Nietzsche pointed to those long and hard processes of creating a man who could make a moral decision, you have been unformed and de-structured so that 'morality' and much else is simply irrelevant to you. You've literally never thought about it or much of anything.

You are always bleating on about what you consider to be undesirable elements in society, well I am concerned about the amount of stupidity in society.

This is true. I have -- or I should say I am developing -- a rigorous attitude of intolerance for excessive license and 'stupidity'. Liberal rot, to quote Tomislav Sunic, can only go so far before a counter-movement must be initiated. If nothing else I predict that within the next 5-10 years we will see more of this because it is needed and necessary.

Any citizen who does not, or cannot, take himself in hand and show that he can 'rule' himself is what I define as undesirable. True, I am dealing in idealistic terms on a forum where ideas are simply discussed and so I certainly have no way to force anything on anyone. But I am entitled to my opinions and ideas -- if they can be presented convincingly. And I think they can.

As for nescience, well that's just a judgement you've made about me, and I can't be bothered to defend myself against it.

No, it really has nothing to do with you in the sense that you mean. To refer to nescience is to present a stance or a position in regard to 'knowledge' -- what it is, what it should be and what it entails. You are just a convenient prop to illustrate what I mean by both knowledge and ignorance.

There is no way that you could defend yourself Harbal. You are a man without structured ideas. With what would you defend yourself? Silence is really your best option. But these gingerbread retorts are fun, too.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 10:03 pm

Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 9:09 pm Yes, I know I'm not stupid, and one of my interests on this forum is identifying and pointing out stupidity in others.

You are in no sense qualified to make those assessments, m'boy. You struggle with the most basic things because, as it seems, thinking things through is so new for you.

I know I'm not qualified, but qualifications are not required for what I practice.

How did you become a whipping boy for these gentlemen?

phyllo wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 10:33 pm How did you become a whipping boy for these gentlemen?

You gonna answer him Harbal?!?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:24 pm You gonna answer him Harbal?!?

I didn't realise he was talking to me, but if he was, I don't understand the question.

Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:39 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:24 pm You gonna answer him Harbal?!?

I didn't realise he was talking to me, but if he was, I don't understand the question.

Say “It just turned out like that. I really don’t know how or why.”

He’ll then be free to carry on as Balkan pastry which is better than many have it.

Harbal wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:39 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 25, 2022 11:24 pm You gonna answer him Harbal?!?

I didn't realise he was talking to me, but if he was, I don't understand the question.

Well there are some posters here who seem to take exception to what you post and the way you post.

I thought there might have been some particular incident in the past that started it. Otherwise, those strong reactions don't make much sense to me.

This is all lightness & jocularity, Phyllo. Another sort of fun.