Philosophy Now Forum

In still reading Gilson "The Unity of Philosophical Experience"
one of his comments is this,

...''be our second law; by his very nature, man is a metaphysical
animal.''

and there is some truth to that, but again, it is a half truth...
not a full truth.... and it is important to see that we only have
half truths, not full truths...but Kropotkin, why can't we have
full truths? and the reason is obvious once you think about it...
we are limited beings, at no point can we ever know enough to
be able to state a full truth.. the evidence enlisted by the
senses can only be partial, the intellect can only bring
in partial truth... our feelings/emotions can only
engage with half truths, not the full truth...

and we can say the same about any philosophy or
philosopher... they engage in half truths... that Kant
"destroyed" metaphysics, is true and yet, clearly isn't true...
that Hegel brought history into philosophy... but aspects
of philosophy engage in the so called "perennial" philosophies...
with each new generation, we return to the ideas and thoughts
that have occurred to philosophers since the beginning of time...
that there are no new ideas must be accepted as fact...
just we emphasis different aspects of life at different times...
or thought of this way.. we have the same deck at all times,
at all places, we just shuffle the deck and get different cards...
and we play our hand with the same deck that Kant and Socrates
and Descartes played with... just different cards...

but we cannot go outside of that deck of cards, at least not yet,
and so, we can only play certain hands.. the metaphysical or
the political or the ethical/moral hand.... we cannot go outside
of those hands because the deck can only hold certain cards...
but we have a lot of variation within those hands...

but to reach the ''full truth'' we have to be able to go outside of
or beyond those set deck of cards....right now we can only
play with deck of cards that have Kings, and Queens and Jacks
and tens and nines.. so on, but to find the full truth,
we have to go beyond that set of cards...
and with a single deck of cards, we can play, literally,
hundreds of card games... but every single time, we
have the exact same deck... that is the human experience....

no matter what we do, we can only play with the deck of cards
that we are delt with, we have life, death, illness, suffering,
old age, birth, love, the ''whole kit and caboodle"...

and because of that limitation, the same deck of cards,
we only have half truths...never the full truth....

so every single philosopher ever, has only given us the half
truth that is within the hand they are delt with...


Kropotkin

i think 'truth' only exists in language... or the text, rather. think of the world as a set of facts that are. you couldn't call this world true or false becuz the idea of there being no world of facts is senseless, so it couldn't be false. and if something can't be false, it can't be true either. that's to say in this particular instance, using the word 'true' to describe whatever are the facts is to presume there may be another world of facts... in which case this world of facts is not the real world of facts.

but by 'world' we mean 'what exists', and that would by definition include both worlds of facts, our false one and the other true one, into a larger world or set of facts which couldn't not be what they are. again, neither true or false.

By virtue of this I am forced to ultimately endorse N's perspectivism as the basis for my epistemology, keter.

"The Kantian thought was that certain very basic structural features of the world we know (space, time, causal relations, etc.) were artifacts of our subjective cognitive faculties rather than properties or relations of things in themselves; but where Kant and Schopenhauer had treated these structures as necessary, a priori conditions of any possible experience whatsoever, the more naturalistically oriented figures who influenced Nietzsche sought to trace them to sources in human empirical psychology, which would of course be contingent. The potential of these ineliminable subject-side influences to vary suggests the idea of treating them as a kind of perspective..."

For more on that 'empirical psychology' see his aphorism on the origins of logic. Imagine this process happening even for the most primitive organisms... selecting first through generalizations and then encoding a genetic memory for particular experiences. This would literally shape the neurological structures later to evolve (the nervous system in general) and provide a basis for 'reasoning' and the production of the logical circuitry necessary to reason in higher organisms (mammals prolly).

Anyway whatever is 'true' is inexplicably bound up in a chain of events and causes that 'went a certain way' through evolution all the way up to language. The driving force is and wuz at all times throughout this process the appropriation and use of a physical world. And imagine how many 'useful errors' in reasoning there are and have been!

How important could a world be in which and intelligent creature could get so much wrong and still flourish? You just think about that.

The will to 'truth'? Don't be silly. We never cared about nor needed to know what wuz 'true', and even what we think is true is the product result of programming glitches in the nervous system that ended up being happy errors that got coded and passed on.

thank you prom....

let us take another well known idea....
that there is a god.. I think, that that original idea
of god came from our inability to see the whole,
to see the entire playing field as it were...
we have limited senses, we have limited intellect,
we have limited emotional range.. the very point
of a human being, is about our limitations
at no point can we see or feel or taste, touch or
smell the "playing field" of existence...there are huge
gaps in human knowledge that cannot be filled by
our senses, experiences or theories... and to cover
that immense gap, we invented a god... god covers
that gap in human knowledge... what is death, what
about the ''after life'', why are we here... the meaning
of existence.... these are gap questions and we created
god to answer them...

but I believe that the "gap answers" are a hinderance to
us now... for we must be brave enough, bold enough
to be able to go without having those "gap answers"
to operate in life with the half truths that we have today...
one might think, how do I get through life without having
some sense of, what is the point of life?

that is the beauty of existence.. we can still function and
operate without having the "full set of instructions" about
life... and we can do so, extremely well... think of religions
as a set of operating manuals that explain what life is
and what it is meant to do and its final cause/effect....
but that operating manual, religious instruction, is flawed
because it too has a limited set of instructions.. it engages
in half truths because that is all it has....it just speaks of
the limited details it has of existence... no matter how
far we go, listing the various explanations of existence,
it will, no matter how extensive it is, it will miss aspects
of existence...it is incomplete...no matter how hard we
try to complete that list...or fill in that circle, we are unable
to.... there is just too much of existence that is outside
of our ability to see, hear, taste, touch or smell... we can't
experience it....thus we can't explain it...
even if we could, if we could, explain everything but
death, it is an incomplete list...because it can't explain
an very important aspect of life, death... and that incompleteness,
is why we are only able to have half truths, not a full truth....

and we must learn to live within those half truths... for we will
never be able to get the full truth, about anything.. and so,
for us, the one aspect of life we can be sure of is this,
our life understanding is incomplete, no matter how hard we
try... and thus we only partially understand the reason for
existence and will never have the complete story...

existence itself is incomplete because our understanding
of existence is incomplete...

on that rock, we must build our house... our understanding
of existence is incomplete.....

Kropotkin

"that's to say in this particular instance, using the word 'true' to describe whatever are the facts is to presume there may be another world of facts... in which case this world of facts is not the real world of facts."

Oops I said that wrong. U shoulda called me on it. Be like 'dude that doesn't sound right I feel like u were tryna say something and said it wrong or something.' It should actually read:

that's to say in this particular instance, using the word 'true' or 'false' to describe whatever are the facts is to presume there could be another world of facts... in which case this world of facts may not be the real world of facts.