Philosophy Now Forum

uwot wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 12:16 pmCertainly Gus. For perhaps the fourth or fifth time to you personally, and given that record probably not the last, what I believe is that all theories are underdetermined. Human creativity is such, in my belief, that for any phenomenon, there will always be alternative explanations. In the current context, the phenomenon is the bible. One explanation is that is inspired by a god who created the entire universe, but for inscrutable reasons during the iron age was entirely concerned with events in an area roughly the size of Denmark, and hasn't shown any obvious interest since. There are alternative explanations which I think are more plausible, but which cannot disprove divine inspiration.

My dear Wee Willy. The 'logic' in your declaration is clear, obvious and sound as far as it goes. Yet it is a closed system, a closed loop. You have set it up that way and, like a rat on a wheel you run on it with dedication. But it goes nowhere, and you go nowhere, and in the larger picture you are unaware of what is being lost right under your nose. The metaphor that is most serviceful here is the one that describes trading one's patrimony for a mess of pottage. You trade in high-value reasoning for low-value and low-grade reasoning. And the consequences become evident. Not so much in you but more around us, and the larger picture is my concern. Additionally, you are snide, surly, rude and destructive to honest conversation as a general feature and in your exposition. In my case at any rate this is a *tell*.

Whatever you are looking at, you are not looking at it right, nor are you looking at the right thing. So what I get from you, which does make you so easy to dismiss, is the high degree of shallowness of your understanding of that which you have willed you will negate and exclude. As you may have gathered I find your *method* completely insufficient to the task -- to a responsible task. And thus you work in some concert with others who also seem irresponsible. The issue of responsibility is a large concern of mine, obviously. You seem to me destructive men, undermining men, but immature men.

Now I too have repeated something to you and many more times than you have outlined your mind-numb recitation: there is more to be gained from examining why you have ensconced yourself within the closed-loop or the rat's wheel; and how it is that a person, and a culture, arrives at the position in which we find you. Joining in with a destructive, even a suicidal, current that undermines structures in so many adjacent areas. In my view you lack self-awareness certainly but awareness generally. One must assume that you believe that you are *finding your bearings*, that you are locating yourself in clarifying truth, and that your method and your views can help others toward the same. By this does not appear as a consequence, rather the opposite appears. I cannot imagine that you would operate from some other position but heaven only knows. In any case this sort of brazen, dismissive certainty is common. It underpins the current discussion here obviously.

Yet my impression of you -- here more you-plural (speaking to a wide movement in culture) -- is that you do not have bearings, you have positions based in negation, which comes so easily really. It appears to me narcissistic in some degree. But I could not say that I do not find those who work angles similar to yours that they are insincere nor dishonest, at least initially. As the position hardens though -- and this is my view -- it does begin to coalesce into an active nescience.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 2:20 am

Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 12:20 am Prayer coming from ones personality reflects acquired needs and desires learned in life. These are superficial and cannot be heard from above.

I do get what you are saying. And in many senses I agree. Where there is a small error is that there are many people, very unsophisticated people, whose entire reality is very raw and even primitive. But we understand, don't we? that there is a God who hears them.

It is a curious topic and one that I think about a lot. I live in a place where a significant percentage of the population lives in almost unbelievably difficult circumstances. They have little or no education and suffer tremendously just to earn a few pesos -- enough to get by for that day. How could they not *pray from their personality*? And what about the fact that what they are is walking, talking 'acquired need'?

I gather that you are speaking as a contemplative, and I certainly understand and respect this, but the fact is there is the other side of the human family -- very far outside of that.

First of all I'm drawn to esoteric or perennial Christianity: what always was. God then is the ineffable quality of consciousness beyond time and space at the apex of the great chain of being from which the levels of reality create our universe in time and space. God is ONE beyond time and space but intentionally involves into its three elemental forces for the purposes of creation.

But you are suggesting a great question essential for Christianity: What is Man? Can Man be divided into inner and outer man as suggested by Plato. If so can Man have an essence he is born with and a personality acquired in life. How does our personality effect our essence.

You seem open to the question but know from experience how this idea is condemned and ridiculed to cause more trouble then it is worth on a site so often best left alone. Can you accept this basic understanding of the difference between essence and personality? Jesus said in the Bible to let the dead bury their dead. He is referring to those whose essence has died and are now just walking personalities. I remember once reading that a person can be shocked to learn how much of their lives are governed by dead people. Does this make any sense to you:

Personality is not a function, and therefore easily distinguished from mind. Personality is a collection of opinions, instinctive habits, education, negative emotions, and habitual postures and movements. It is in a sense all our programming. It is what we were taught to think and feel, not what we would necessarily think and feel if essence had been left to develop without the intrusions of personality. Essence is what we were born with, our talents, our limitations, and our natural preferences and aversions. Nothing in personality is hardwired; everything in essence is hardwired. In a perfect world preferences in personality would reflect preferences in essence. But our world is far from perfect.

If true, many people from poor countries can have a stronger living essence than those in which personalities built on acquired needs and desires are dominant. Does an Oxford graduate understand Christianity better than a poor person with a quality of need essential to experience rebirth? The idea of course is the ideal of a growing balance between essence and personality but modern society doesn't allow it and is only concerned with an educated dead personality. A very dangerous future and some have to see it for what it is.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:15 pmMy dear Wee Willy. The 'logic' in your declaration is clear, obvious and sound as far as it goes. Yet it is a closed system, a closed loop.

Gotta disagree with you there Gus. It is typical of people who have some strongly held conviction to assume that others who don't share that belief are either closed minded or wilfully nescient. Fair play to you for shaking both those sticks. The irony is generally lost on such halfwits; it is of course they who by committing to a single hypothesis close their mind to any alternative. Can you really not see that?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:15 pmAdditionally, you are snide, surly, rude and destructive to honest conversation as a general feature and in your exposition.

Yep, sometimes Gus, but then some people are arseholes.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:15 pmWhatever you are looking at, you are not looking at it right, nor are you looking at the right thing.

What standards are you applying? As I have said before, what you look at, and how you look at it is your aesthetic choice.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:15 pmIn any case this sort of brazen, dismissive certainty is common. It underpins the current discussion here obviously.

I am fully confident that you will not ultimately be able to attribute your values to anything other than aesthetics. Surprise me.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:55 pm Who and what are you fighting Lacewing?

No one and nothing.

How about you?

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 2:45 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:55 pm Who and what are you fighting Lacewing?

No one and nothing.

How about you?

I love your open-ended questions! I am definitely DEFINITELY fighting a whole range of things. Perhaps it is the nature of men to be warriors? And perhaps the need of the present to rediscover a warrior spirit and ethos? If one (if a man) cannot identify his battles -- his need for battles, his need to fight -- what sort of a man is that?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 4:52 pm

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 2:45 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:55 pm Who and what are you fighting Lacewing?

No one and nothing.

How about you?

I love your open-ended questions! I am definitely DEFINITELY fighting a whole range of things. Perhaps it is the nature of men to be warriors? And perhaps the need of the present to rediscover a warrior spirit and ethos? If one (if a man) cannot identify his battles -- his need for battles, his need to fight -- what sort of a man is that?

So, when you asked the question of me, were you implying that I was doing so, or were you urging me to do so?

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 5:29 pm So, when you asked the question of me, were you implying that I was doing so, or were you urging me to do so?

Clearly you are fighting (epic) battles. But you seem not to have a great deal of self-awareness. Yet you tell me you have no battles with nothing and no one — “not no how”.

If I am right you could become more conscious of the wider struggles.

If I am wrong then your ‘grass hut’ is safe and secure!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 9:28 pm

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 5:29 pm So, when you asked the question of me, were you implying that I was doing so, or were you urging me to do so?

Clearly you are fighting (epic) battles.

Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff that you think you know about other people? It must serve/suit yourself somehow?

I am not fighting epic battles, not on any level. I do not need to... you see, there are other ways than fighting your way through stories and imagination. You are free to do that if it suits you. It's just a shame that you drag other people into it.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 9:28 pmBut you seem not to have a great deal of self-awareness.

If you were to speak with anyone who knows (and has known) me, they would laugh at such a presumptuous statement. Self-awareness is one of the things people have always appreciated about me.

What is it with people (like yourself) who claim to know others better than they know themselves? How superior and knowing you must imagine yourself to be!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 9:28 pm If I am right you could become more conscious of the wider struggles.

Being aware of 'wider struggles' does not necessarily lead one to engage in them the way that you do.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 9:28 pmIf I am wrong then your ‘grass hut’ is safe and secure!

Ah, so if I am not like you -- not thinking like you, not believing like you, not doing as you do -- then I must surely not be seeing nor capable of anything beyond a 'grass hut'.

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 10:30 pm Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff that you think you know about other people? It must serve/suit yourself somehow?

I am not fighting epic battles, not on any level. I do not need to... you see, there are other ways than fighting your way through stories and imagination. You are free to do that if it suits you. It's just a shame that you drag other people into it.

My impression re the battles fought seemed evident in your loooonnngggg exchanges with IC.

I had no other source.

However, simultaneously, there are cultural wars going on in which we are subsumed. Even if we don’t want to be, we are pulled into them.

I did not say anything particularly outrageous. Why so combative !?!

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:36 pm My impression re the battles fought seemed evident in your loooonnngggg exchanges with IC.

I'm just special.

She doesn't love everyone the way she loves me.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:36 pm I did not say anything particularly outrageous. Why so combative !?!

Why are you imagining me as combative?

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sun Feb 06, 2022 12:00 am Why are you imagining me as combative?

It was a joke! Sheeesh!

I’m getting ready to start a new thread to talk more about Nietzsche. I began rereading The Antichrist. It was mentioned in The Cross of Christ (John Stott) which just arrived.

Lacewing — how are we going to reconcile Jesus, the Pauline religion, the Jewish Jesus and the Northern European dasein? How, HOW?!?

(I’m very curious Lacewing : what are you reading?)

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:59 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:36 pm My impression re the battles fought seemed evident in your loooonnngggg exchanges with IC.

I'm just special.

She doesn't love everyone the way she loves me.

I've had a lot of fun questioning, challenging, and exploring the bizarre claims and beliefs that come out of Christianity and I.C.'s narrow and distorted interpretations.

Yes, Alexis, many men do love framing just about anything as a war of some kind... in which they (themselves) are authorities, soldiers, or heroes... or perhaps they tell of an epic battle for another's very 'soul'... and they position themselves alongside a god (of one sort or another) to tell everyone else what to think and be.

It's fascinating to toy with and poke at because it's such a contrived and long-running pattern -- and it's a wonder that these self-ascribed 'divine knowers' don't recognize the intoxication in themselves, as they surely recognize it in others.

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sun Feb 06, 2022 1:08 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:59 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 11:36 pm My impression re the battles fought seemed evident in your loooonnngggg exchanges with IC.

I'm just special.

She doesn't love everyone the way she loves me.

I've had a lot of fun questioning, challenging, and exploring the bizarre claims and beliefs that come out of Christianity and I.C.'s narrow and distorted interpretations.

Yes, Alexis, many men do love framing just about anything as a war of some kind... in which they (themselves) are authorities, soldiers, or heroes... or perhaps they tell of an epic battle for another's very 'soul'... and they position themselves alongside a god (of one sort or another) to tell everyone else what to think and be.

It's fascinating to toy with and poke at because it's such a contrived and long-running pattern -- and it's a wonder that these self-ascribed 'divine knowers' don't recognize the intoxication in themselves, as they surely recognize it in others.

One great advantage of feminism ; it relieves macho men of their pressing need to be macho.

Lacewing wrote: ↑Sun Feb 06, 2022 1:08 am I've had a lot of fun questioning, challenging, and exploring the bizarre claims and beliefs that come out of Christianity and I.C.'s narrow and distorted interpretations.

Yes, Alexis, many men do love framing just about anything as a war of some kind... in which they (themselves) are authorities, soldiers, or heroes... or perhaps they tell of an epic battle for another's very 'soul'... and they position themselves alongside a god (of one sort or another) to tell everyone else what to think and be.

It's fascinating to toy with and poke at because it's such a contrived and long-running pattern -- and it's a wonder that these self-ascribed 'divine knowers' don't recognize the intoxication in themselves, as they surely recognize it in others.

Here, as I fairly stated (without any offense or rudeness) is an outline of you *battle* you are engaged in. The idea you work with is rudimentary. It is a truly *reductive* idea and it leads you to a totally reductive position. You have devised a reductive formula that can be applied not only, say, in the domain of theology, but as the launching-point of a critique against any intellectual hierarchy. And you do this, as I poignantly suggest, from your 'grass-hut'.

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" -- Camille Paglia

In fact though you have done little and perhaps even no questioning, challenging and exploring of those 'bizarre claims' that have come out of Christianity, because you have never made any sort of effort to study the entire question! You have developed and you operate from a simple sentimental position, not an intellectual one. Your critique is agonizingly superficial.

So it seems to me that what I have often said has a good deal of truth in it: the position you hold is not really your own position, it is one that has been offered to you and is common in our intellectual day and age. It is an idée fixe ("an idea or desire that dominates the mind; an obsession"). You make it seem as if it has real substance, but my impression of your handling of your own idea is that it is all puffed up. It deflates just by looking at it!

The actual critique -- of Christianity -- was laid out in Nietzsche's work.

"In me the Christianity of my forebears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns against Christianity. In me . . . Christianity devours itself."

That word devour is especially interesting and relevant. Because of the degree that these notions and ideas and sentiments act as acids. Often those who embody these sentiments and ideas turn into acidic actors. And their acid functions strictly in relation to what they attempt to dissolve -- somewhat parasitically. At times I cannot escape the suspicion that what is dissolved is their own self. But I gain that perception looking at the larger, developing picture. Dissolution in the social world.

While I personally see, as so many do see, that Nietzsche had many levels of valid critique (CG Jung said that a 'mature' person was required to deal responsibly with Nietzsche's powerful discourse), I propose that there is a great deal to be got if one focuses on the outcome of what happens in a person, and in people, when they lose all sense of bearing -- as seems evidently to happen when a nihilistic spirit grabs hold of them. And I suggest to you that what I quote here:

"...in which they (themselves) are authorities, soldiers, or heroes... or perhaps they tell of an epic battle for another's very 'soul'... and they position themselves alongside a god (of one sort or another) to tell everyone else what to think and be"

is an assertion that is borne of a nihilistic attitude which must lead to a lived and lived-out praxis. In your case, based on what you write, you take a stance against all intellectual hierarchies where you note -- and this is important -- the creative work of men. But as I say you are merely speaking from your *grass hut*. You present no alternative ideas.

Interestingly, Belinda chimes in here, but to what effect?

One great advantage of feminism ; it relieves macho men of their pressing need to be macho.

So let me get this straight -- this is now reduced to a feminist's battle against defining idea now associated, negatively, with masculinity? So woman leaves, say, the Cathedral and treks back to the grass-hut for an all woman's pow-wow?

This is a curious manoeuvre!