Philosophy Now Forum

Cinderella’s sisters Anastasia and Drizella are your typical secular feminists.

Nick_A wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:50 pm David's philosophy concerning the human condition. can be reduced to three words. These three words which offer both the recognition of and solution to the human condition are "Yo Momma Sucks." Could Nietzsche have said it better? No, a stroke of genius secularism will be forever grateful for.

the ree human concer be will foreve of grater be huma Sucks. can andition con con of anditiond th of genius will fords solution. con. cognius whiche for etzsche havid itiond secularism whiche havid ition the "Yo to thre "Yo the three huma sophilosophichese ree human betzscheseculd.

Lacewing wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:31 pm Oh my god, David... that is so funny!

Nick_A wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:24 pm davidm

Kids kids kids

OK, you must be an advocate of metaphysical repression with the goal of spirit killing to have such disdain for the young.

davidm wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2017 1:20 am

Lacewing wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2017 11:31 pm Oh my god, David... that is so funny!

Thanks. I do crack me up sometimes.

I don't disagree with most of what you say although I'd give it far more sinister consequences if it comes to a boiling point, which seems to be inevitable.

What I object to is your use of the terms secular and secularism which in actuality can be anything which is not theistically inclined or excludes theistic interpretations. Calling the Present Age "The Great Beast" is apropos when considering the ponderous and failing institutions which are currently in control. An analogy would be one of super massive stars which keeps synthesizing elements to keep itself in operation until the Iron Age when it all implodes.

The Secular is replete with labels such as given by an Age to an Age - not unlike the one you apply to the current period. In that sense "Secularism" is granted a temporary title, a connotational description or placeholder as it were. Its denotational features, conversely, can default to any narration possible between an Iron Age and a Golden one.

…….In "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life" (1934), Weil develops the theme of collectivism as the trajectory of modern culture.

Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been so less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.

Weil is not defending the individual as laisse-faire atom but as subordinated to inimical modern forces by "production and consumption," with science, technology, labor, money, and social life turning historical means into corporate and collectivist ends.

The inversion of the relation between means and ends -- an inversion which is to a certain extent the law of every oppressive society -- here becomes total or nearly so, and extends to nearly everything.

Weil then analyzes the relationship bwtween economics and the state, and militarism as an adjunct to extending economic control and social content to the goals of the powerful. Sometimes she uses Marxian or anarchist viewpoints to demonstrate her point; other times she uses them to demonstrate their failure to have anticipated the shrewdness of the capitalist elites and institutions to bypass and overcome the logical obstacles to their version of reality. With the modern spirit has come the systematization of accumulation, organization, and control of the range and relationships of all human activity. Power is concentrated and like a whirlpool absorbs every facet of life. Oppression is inevitably bound to productivity, efficiency, coercion. Productivity and progress, consumption, and limitless expansion of desire and power are all aspects of modern culture. And yet society revolts not against its own oppressors but against nature.

In an aphorism of "The Great Beast," Weil begins the transition from analyzing society to discovering a solution or antidote. Here her thoughts hearken to anthropological thinking circulating in the early twentieth century, which maintained that society is a project of individual relationships, a projection given life and meaning separate from those relationships, a projection to which power and thought and authority is renounced. This is not a renunciation to the fictional cooperative called "society" but to individuals as authorities, who then contrive the symbols, ploys, and coercive social structures. Anthropology called these "totems"--Weil does not use the term--which define God, religion, and the norms of society via the power of institutions to interpret and sanction.

According to Weil, the person's accession to society, the individual's renunciation of values to the collective as defined by a small group, is based on ignorance and fear, fear that without society (which is to say the state), people will collapse into crime and evil. The social and collective is seen as transcending individuals, as a supernatural entity from which nationalism and war is as normal as science, progress, and consumption. All of these evils are taking place simultaneously in a social context. The individual has probably never reflected on these issues at all, never acknowledged his or her degree of complicity in this system. But, say the apologist for the Great Beast, the individual need have no direct responsibility,

The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice, gold is the social order. In the case of ambition, power is the social order.

Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.

As long as one accepts the "totem," and subordinates all values to the collective, the contrived dichotomy of good and evil will trap individuals in fear. But the solution to the dilemma Weil depicts is not Nietzsche's transcendence of morality but a simple perception of the nature of society, of the nature of the "Great Beast."..........................

Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.

Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2017 5:42 pm Nick_A wrote:

Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.

Is society what people do when they cooperate in any project?

Muggeridge Through the Microphone (1969)
One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in terms of enlightened expediency.

People cooperating on a project can all be individuals with a soul. The great beast lacks a human soul and reacts by the duality of the animal mind.

Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2017 6:54 pm Nick wrote:

People cooperating on a project can all be individuals with a soul. The great beast lacks a human soul and reacts by the duality of the animal mind.

What is society other than people cooperating? What is society other than individual souls who have sort of agreed to cooperate?

Society is nothing apart from the cooperating souls who compose it.

In my opinion, the most luminous intelligence of the twentieth century.

"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct."
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society

Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2017 8:36 pm Malcolm Muggeridge. I remember him. A character!

Nick_A wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2017 9:36 pmI can see why Malcolm Muggeridge isn’t an idol for progressives. He wrote:

"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct."
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.