The Philosophers

Let’s think about this. Whether the subject is ethics, political economy, God and religion, human sexuality, just war, race, gender, astrology or whatever, what does it mean to “study it”.

It seems there would be two approaches here:

On the one hand, some will argue that they have studied it [whatever] and that only if others reach the same conclusions about it [whatever] as they do can they be said to have truly studied it too.

Or one can acknowledge that given the complexity of all the variables intertwined in any particular set of relationships, and given the extent to which we live in a world awash in contingency, chance and change, we are not likely to have accumulated all of the knowledge necessary to state definitively that how we have come to study and understand it [whatever] reflects the optimal or the only rational understanding.

And that’s before we get to the gap between what we think we know about it [whatever] and all that would need to be known about the very nature of Existence itself, in order to know anything definitively.

Finally, there’s the distinction between the either/or world [of mathematics, the laws of nature, empirical fact and the logical rules of language] and our is/ought reactions to any particular set of facts that we can all agree upon about it.

As it relates philosophically to what I construe to be the most important existential question of all: How ought one to live?

To live, in other words, in a problematic world that is clearly awash in conflicting goods and in political economy.

I merely put my own “spin” regarding dasein on all of this.

…paging Zoot Allures…paging Zoot Allures… :wink:

You can find him here.

Value Ontology is the final truth, because it is the fundamental. No truth exists without reference to (a) self-valuing.

Well many such non-valued ‘truths’ sort of ‘exist’, just not really. I propose two new categories: truths that actually exist, because self-valued, and truths that “exist” because they can be said to be the case despite not actually being valued by anything.

But does anything even fall into this latter category? I can’t think of any examples. It remains basically an empty category of inverted possibility, something posited like “nothingness” because everything else already exists to both disprove it and to imply it as a mere edge case and limit-point.

Now we find what Nietzsche lacked: the means of achieving transvaluation. Self-valuing is this means. But as far as I know, only Fixed and now (as of today) myself are the only ones who truly understand this.

All others are lodged in the matrix. But still they at least self-value… as matrix. Also as reality, sometimes and oftentimes in spite of “themselves” (of the false matrix-self).

Hahaha.

Can’t wait until reality is revaluated along these lines of VO. Lots of wonderful work ahead for us to do.

:laughing: Not much hubris here.

When was the last time you were in touch with every human being in existence?

But my question: How does one learn to transvalue when the starting point is hubris, which can only muddy the waters or the lenses of perception?
Remember what happened to Icarus?

We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to its own shade.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers

It happens to the best!

Zoot wrote:

Thanks for the invite, zoot. And, sure, I’ll pop in here from time to time. But only insofar as I find discussions revolving around that which is [still] of utmost importance to me: probing the extent to which the tools of philosophy are relevant in assessing conflicting value judgments rooted in dasein out in a particular world embedded in one or another rendition of political economy.

In other words, helpful in yanking me out of the fucking hole that I’ve dug myself into.

As for this:

Yep, that’s me. I’ve been squabbling with the objectivists now for years. In part as, well, “entertainment” while “waiting for godot”… and in part in the hope that someone may well actually succeed in nudging me in a less despairing and brutally bleak direction.

Oh, and thanks for this:

On the other hand as I noted above:

[b][i]We’re on the same page here. I agree. It’s just that, for me, nothing of what I note above really goes away. It’s not like any particular individual can think through the question “should I rob this bank?” and come up with a moral narrative that settles it. At best she can come to believe that her own narrative is the most reasonable. And then in a world of contingency, chance and change, her experiences, relationships, sources of information etc., evolve/devolve and she comes to think differently about it.

I’m still back to grappling with my own intellectual contraption: That in an essentially absurd and meaningless world that ends in oblivion, there is no way [philosophically or otherwise] to know how one ought to live.

Unless of course there is and I am just not privy to it here and now. [/b][/i]

I’ll be sticking with ILP for now. I only allot so much time a day for this sort of thing. And why not contribute here yourself from time to time. If only because there are actually a lot more folks around here who might learn something they had never even considered before. You might even persuade the more sophisticated among them to give your own forum a chance.

pathos-of-distance.forumotion.com/t2p25-ahem#265

Here is my grandfather punishing the then prime minister. (The guy in the thumbnail is the prime minister, Dries Van Agt. My grandfather, Marcus Bakker, is the guy who makes him squirm)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsPWb7ReqgA[/youtube]

Beautiful times. The Cold War wasn’t so bad.

Haha
pathos-of-distance.forumotion.com

predictable.

Jakob wrote:

It is more than likely that women rather than men think astrology is scientific and has some merit, but it has been dubbed “a metaphysic of dunces”. My question… is not astrology similar to religion inasmuch as there is conformity and deference to higher authority of some kind, which in turn resembles “the mentality of the authoritarian personality.”

People high on authoritarianism tend to have high respect for acknowledged authorities and there are also those who are aggressive towards those who think differently.

If I had fear of heights, Id get Vertigo from looking down at you here, SM.

I like you, but it is beyond me how someone can do something as stupid as you are doing here. To judge something you havent researched. It is just beyond me how shitty life must be for people who live like that.

Up your game.

At least granted that you don’t have a truly shitty chart, which may explain peoples dislike of astrology - they see they were born worthless, and they resent that so they claim ignorance of it.

Possible too!

Jakob,

On the other hand, does your sense of great worth and identity come from your own astrological readings?
It works both ways I would think.

I would imagine that it would be quite ignorant (not knowing or understanding a thing in the first place) to assume that one’s self was born “worthless” based on what astrology says of that person.

Your above statement also reeks of ignorance, Jakob. Try contemplating and considering in your spare time, all of the African Americans, let us say, who were thought to be ignorant and worthless and eventually flew and soared higher than you could ever imagine or reach for yourself?
You might also ask yourself the question: "Who was given the greater opportunities?

I wonder ~ how much higher can a person really fly when their own sense of self is at least partly measured and/or judged based on those who they deem as worthless, and so much less so than their own selves?

Hell, even back then the exchanges revolved more [rather than less] around “waiting for godot”. Besides, how are my own speculations not “ineffably and inextricably” embedded in what must surely be a gigantic gap between what “I” think is true here and now about all this and all that one would need to know about the very nature of Existence itself.

I always start there. Trust me: only a fool would suppose that infinitesimally tiny specks of existence like us can actually put more that just a few hapless dings in it.

No, my subjective stressors reside more in the future than the past. But how on earth can I explain what that means to someone who really hasn’t a clue as to what motivates the shit “in my head” here and now. These exchanges can only go so far in rooting out the variables that configure and reconfigure [from the cradle to the grave] the eixstential parameters of my own particular “I”.

On the other hand, sure, maybe you know me better than I imagine anyone ever could:

Still, it really is all just a blur now.

Again, this may well be more perceptive than anything that I can come up with. And yet my cynicism still seems embedded more in that dwindling future than the ever expanding past. And here folks like Moreno were very effective in reminding me that the points I was making really were just political prejudices rooted in existential contraptions rooted in dasein. That kind of shook me up.

I can only assume that perhaps you are being ironic. And, if not, I’ll weep for your future. Not to mention the future of some who will cross your path.

Oh, he’s back alright. Back to the future.

Jakob wrote:

What are you talking about?

I have no chart.

A chart is generated from your birth date, time and place.

It is the perspective on the cosmos from your birth moment. It is your root in time space.

Most people have suboptimal charts. Everyone has a difficult or disappointing chart. Astrology is intensely cruel. Thats probably why Jesus forbade it.

You can avoid ever knowing yourself fine, just be a spectator to other peoples self discovery.
astrologyweekly.com/forum/

you’ll see.
Its far harsher and raw-life than philosophy tends to be.

Of all the astrological systems, the Vedic one is the cruelest. Its matter of emphasis. Since astrology involves exploring all the potential weaknesses of a constitution to their cosmic consequences, there is unlimited potential for creating psychological hells. There is only one way into astrology that doesn’t damage the psyche - will to power.

You, SM, come across to me as Saturnian Virgonic. What appeals to you in my art is the melancholic depths I reach, the truths that connect only in these depths. Death, lack of meaning, meaning therein.

I think you have Earth and a touch of air, a lot of water that is still and quite deep, there is consideration, time.
Hesitation before what isn’t tried and tested, but little inclination to try and test - enough has been discovered already.

Compare this to a Fire-Air person like Trump, a Gemini Sun, with Jupiter andNeptune in Libra and Moon in Sagittarius, he can work with hypotheticals and beat the game without having any prior grounds. Air-Fire works from the future more than from the past. Earth-Water are entirely susceptible to precedent.

Not even close.

Have another guess.

I will give you a kick start…Incompatibility: Fire signs, like Aries, Leo, which is you, no?

Let me guess.

Fixed cross.

You may be the first one to dive in, kickstart a project, or start a new trend. The trouble is your staying power is not quite as strong and can make you hesitate, so that you wind up with a zillion genius ideas that never get off the ground. You want to become a leader without doing everything yourself, becoming completely bossy and domineering. There can be a “my way or the highway” pitfall for you.

It doesn’t take much to analyse a person and astrology leans heavily on this, hence Jung’s fascination with astrology.

The important point is that the horoscope is true only in the time sense, not astronomically. It is independent of the stars. We see that menstruation has a moon period, yet it does not coincide with the phases of the moon; otherwise all women would menstruate at the same time, and they don’t. It simply means that there is a moon-law in every woman and likewise the laws of the stars in every human being but not in the relation of cause and effect. – C.G. Jung, December 11, 1929

If we are to have any hope whatsoever of understanding Nietzsche, we should not see him as merely another link in a chain of thinkers. We must instead recognize his thought for what it was and still remains: a radical break with the Western intellectual tradition. Which is not to say, of course, that Nietzsche’s thought was not influenced by that of others, for it most certainly was.