iambiguous wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 1:06 am
AJ in a nutshell:
"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist." Will Durant
Ironically enough, Durant noted this in his book,
The Story of Philosophy.
Iambiguous, you fool, you don't seem to know enough about Will Durant to understand what his focus was. You extract this portion only because you believe that it encapsulates and explains
my focus in the world of ideas. It does not. My suggestion to you would be to place a mirror in front of your computer screen and perform a wee bit of work in relation to your own (ridiculous, circulatory) non-intellectual project. What you have quoted of Durant functions better as a self-critique. I will demonstrate.
If you were interested in ideas, and if you had a genuine sense of their relevance and importance, the discussion of ideas would be your focus. Instead, what you do is to defeat the possibility that ideas offer through a reductive and insidiously boring cut'n'paste in which you reduce ideas to inanities. You are not moved by ideas, Iambiguous, and you do not deal in ideas. What then motivates you? A type of crude Marxism is perhaps the best description.
If you were not yourself involved in both dishonesty and the same sterile intellectualism you condemn, or in your case the blabbering of a frozen intellect, I think you would have a great deal more to say. You would engage with ideas not merely shoot down those who work with them. It seems to me that because you lack mental integrity that it is you who avoids the problems of human existence. That ideas lead to action -- to making decisions -- affronts your sensibilities. If one idea is presented as higher than or superior to another this causes a freak-out in you. You crap yourself and then languish in the aromatic squishiness of it. Your perpetual refrain is "What about the Blacks, the Gays, the Women and the Jews?" yet you never delve into the issue or the problem in which you are stuck. If it is not correct to say you are a *stale intellect* (since you have so little intellectuality) I would certainly say that you need to confront ideas; become more familiar with them; allow them to work on you. You won't and in fact you can't: you established yourself on specific lines and you will follow those lines until you leave the earth-realm.
In this sense, I regret to put it to you, I see you as a failure. But you are a failure among many failures. You are a failure in
a time of failing. At the very least you could, with some humility, simply face this. And let others carry the torch that is inconceivable to you.
In this sense, jackass, I could refer to you in this way: "at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth". First, for you no truth exists. You are situated in an anti-truth position and defend it like a junkyard dog. Just admit it! The burden will lift.
It is also true that you do not have an *ivory tower* per se but you do have a *tower* of another sort: your reductionism, your anti-intellectualism, and the neurotic repetition of the same idea in post after post after post. Not for a week or a month but for decades. Indeed it seems to be about a half-century.
I cannot be sure from this snippet where Durant was coming from (you take a quote out of its context and fail to explain the particular thrust he was working)(and likely have no idea yourself what it was) but your use of his reference to "esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals", if it is intended to knock me back on my ass with its confrontational honestly, misses the mark. First, I have no involvement with or interest in "professionally philosophical periodicals" and no real interest in esoterica. You make a ridiculous mistake here. For you -- and for example -- a reference to Shakespeare or the philosophers of the 17th century (an area that interests me for valid intellectual reasons) is interpreted as something unearthly and
esoteric. But in fact it may well be one of the foundations to our own age and is certainly a foundation of our own
self. This idea though is incomprehensible to you, pea-brain, and you seem to get offended that something you don't understand it talked about. Durant & wife wrote 10-11 volumes titled
The Story of Civilization [his life work] and I can assure you that he was familiar with and concerned about the ideas that helped in the creation of Occidental culture and civilization. You do not have even a
foggy idea of what this entails.
For you, you fuck, to insinuate that I "wander farther and farther away from [my] time and place, and from the problems that absorb [my] people and [my] century" is
completely misplaced. Are you drunk? I think this is why you cannot understand conservatism and also why those who are more radical than mere Conservatives, and who oppose some of the perversions of Liberalism with clear enunciation of idea, are portrayed by you as bad/evil. Again your constant refrain is "What about Blacks Women Gays and Jews?" Yet you know nothing about Blacks and Black History, nothing about women and their political and social struggles (which certainly have their place), but simultaneously you have no understanding of the foundations of conservative throughy in relation to femininity, to the structure of the family. And what's this about Gays and Jews? You do not know what the historical Jew
is, you dolt. You are
absolutely ignorant in this area.
What you do is that you block the discussion of idea in relation to contemporary issues. By
wandering farther and farther into a reductionist position you ties yourself up in a limited pit in which you have trapped yourself. I already explained this to you months back. Had you done work in relation to it you'd be in a different place now. But your will has been set and in that morass you will remain.
So let's take this:
The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him...He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist.
And rewrrite it a bit in such a way that it describes not
my situation but
your situation.
You have no concern for philosophy. You
pose here and nothing more. You retreat into a tiny corner which is expressed in your cut'n'paste posts which repeat, time and dreary time again the same semi-idea! You yourself are disconnected from *the world* by your choices. And indeed you have a 'technical terminology' that circulates around you with your notion of Dasein and how you are *drawn & quartered* as well as *fragmented* and of divided mind
that results in no mind at all.
Take a fucking hike, jerk!
[The relevance in writing this, and with this apparent invective, is only to shed light on the failures of our age and the failures of ourselves in relation to the challenges of our age.
Don't take it personally!]
