Jake - What does it mean to withstand what is real?
Again, since I am talking to someone with an understanding of perspectivism, I will talk differently than to someone with a more standard metaphysical lust. I think you suffer from metaphysical lust, but you’re maybe not terminal in your metaphysical affliction.
It’s a continuum. For what is perfect?
My dog is real. A pack (that I see in front of me) of dogs is an instantiation (and a good one) of a set of dogs, which, being a set, is less real than my dog. The set “dogs” is less real than the pack of dogs that I see. For when I say “the set ‘dogs’” I am not talking about any particular dogs at all. That’s just abstraction.
When I say that the set “dogs” is more real than my dog, I am fucked. But sure, it’s a “real” set.
The verb “to exist” has fucked more brains than any other. It requires an advanced analysis, evidently, or you stop making sense. It’s a skill that every philosopher should have, but few do. Metaphysical lust has poisoned their brains.
If you were to ask me what reality is, I would say, that which happens.
What is actually happening. I don’t care if it is an idea or a cloud or a cup of coffee being made.
If it is progressing in time as itself, it is real. Reality is what can be pointed out as it happens.
Its as complicated as you can make it, and U is right, reality is ultimately more basic than dichotomies can describe, so no matter how complicated it gets it will only get away from the truth, which is where things come together into some it. Truth is a woman because of its it-factor. It seduces everything to it. And all too often truth is merely apparent, and the deeper truth of rage is fed and it swallows truth in more truth. Truth is the pit in the Return of the Jedi. Ideas usually are riling up masses or drilling marines to disclose truths that have nothing to do with these ideas, in which ideas are swallowed and in which ideas come to annihilate each other. Bread and games, truth in flames.
As I see it there are there layers then; idea, effort, and truth. Ideas struggling inside a form under time; How an idea is tested for its reality, but also how man comes to meet himself.
Yes. But I’m not only saying that ideas or thoughts are real because they mobilize people or other ‘tangible things’, I’m also saying they are real because they exist.
What is real is what exists, however it exists is irrelevant ontologically speaking. The concepts of real, existence, and truth are all meaning the exact same thing, and they are tautological.
Things exist if they…exist. It’s just that simple.
Hitler, the Nazi pigs, the Storm Troopers, the Islamic terrorist groups, the bullies of the world ~ they all overcame morality.
I am not saying that you are but you almost sound like one of them.
Can you give me an example of what You mean by overcoming morality? An everyday scenario?
Perhaps that is not such a negative when you actually think about it.
There are those mental processes but there is also the response of the human Heart ~ that “compelling force of feeling” which you seem almost to denigrate.
Of course, at some point, using those mental processes, in harmony with the Heart to act, is the so-called “true” instinct of morality which will hopefully continue to perpetuate and save humanity.
True morality can be the impetus to cause people to act for the sake of the innocent others, like those who fought Nazism and those who fight terrorism. (sorry for any redundancy here).
But of course, perhaps you were speaking of moralistic, judgmental people, people who would take away our own personal freedoms and liberties…
I posit that moral people are immoral by arrogantly presuming morality exists
The problem with morality is self-righteousness and the trouble with integrity is judgmentality. There is no way out of that bind and even if you flatter yourself in being amoral as a way to beat the game, you’re still guilty of conceit.
True, morality doesnt ‘exist’. Its ground is the semantic-ontological vacuum of post modern, pre-apocalyptic trends.
However, debate on the essential, temporal defying quality of ethical intuition, is not a closed chapter, by any means, no matter how.deniers beg to differ by all odds.
Plato, in the dialogue Eutyphro, argues along the lines of positing ‘holiness’, as a key concept as a litmus test, around which the whole question of morality can be grounded. If the gods define what holiness consists of, does it simply derive from merely own its definition? The answer exposes the mere sophistry that the question is dressed up to be, not assuring a finality put to rest regarding it.
The thousands of years question, and subsequent, incremental preoccupation with it, shows that morality is grounded more as a considered point by point process, rather then a vestige of its fatalistic abandonment .
In this sense, historicity, is far from the kind of ultimate tool of further decay and entropic anxiety, becoming a renewable , reusable tool for perjoritive expression to the power of the will. Where will comes not from a sense of periodic majorities’s confusion, the sense of overcoming that chasm, which looms over the break between men and animals, it is the overcoming of the disturbing Darwinian assumption ,by a counter hypothesis based on formal and intentional expression to the supposed , perhaps, innate goals of mankind: to define future probable goals of mankind.
Arc - the Nazis didn’t overcome morality at all. They just had a different one than most peoples. They believed that they were morally justified in what they did. Even if many Germans were not so convinced.
the more I think about it, the more I think that
the question, “Morality is fake and doesn’t exist” is
really the problem…
Morality exists but it depends on what you mean by fake?
the fact is, that each society has a different sense of “Morality”…
it still exists, it is just vastly different for each society…
the Aztecs for example, thought nothing of ripping the heart out
of their enemies in a public ceremoney…and the Egyptian
Pharaohs would marry their siblings… and in Europe,
from 1500 to 1650, would have not given a second thought to
burning “Heretics”…each would have defended their actions as
being not only “moral” but neccessary…
so we have morality…it is just vastly different from society to society…
does that make it fake? depends on how you define fake…
Well, according to nominalism, or at least according to one version of nominalism, there are no apples out there in the world. This is because the word “apple” is a reference to a universal. A universal is something that can be instantiated; something that has instances, known as its particulars. Apples can be of different sizes, shapes and colors; they can exist at different points in time and space; they can have different chemical compositions; and so on. Clearly, the word “apple” refers to a universal. It refers to something that can exist in many different forms. Thus, a nominalist would have to argue, rather strangely, that apples do not exist; that they are mere concepts or names.
You can define existence, truth and reality as identical for simplicity, but you lose out on utility from all the nuances that you can get if you define them differently.
Consider Popper’s pluralism of existence across 3 worlds: physical stuff, mental stuff inspired from the physical, and structured concepts inspired by the mental. You might say a spade that you’re picking up is real because it has a physical manifestation, but an imagined, dreamed or hallucinated spade isn’t real even though it exists mentally - and these definitions give you extra explanatory power through differentiating between existence and reality. You might say that the fact that you are holding such a spade, if you are, is true, but the fact that you are holding 2 spades is false, if you’re not - even if you are maybe imagining that you are holding a 2nd spade in your other hand. This differentiates between existence and truth by validating the existence of falsity in the mental world if not the physical - which can apply to both the real or the not-real.
Perhaps you would rather step away from this common way of using the words in question in favour of a less efficient way of using them - by saying that it exists, it is real and it is true that you are holding a physical manifestation of a spade, not holding an imagined spade, and the imagined spade exists as an imagined spade, and it is both real and true that this is the case. In this case you would just swapped one way of explaining the same thing with another one that tends to require more words to explain: semantics. You would have gained simplicity in definition at the cost of efficiency, in order to neither gain or lose any explanatory power. I would simply ask: what’s the point?
We all know that you aren’t going to run into fictional characters in the street, but you can either apply Occam’s Razor to the words you use to describe their existence, reality and truth - or not, not that Occam’s Razor is objectively mandatory…
I think this whole thread is turning into a bit of a mess over what words to choose to describe what we all know are identical things.
Rather than discard morals and values altogether on the one hand, or absolutize them on the other, I would rather get creative with them.
My morals and values are grounded on my thoughts and feelings about how the world, and the people and things in it, should be.
Feelings come and go, I try to find some consistency in them (value(s), however imperfect.
People, places and things feelings are reacting to also come and go and one thing leads to another, I try to find ways of maximiizng what I consider to be good, while minimizing the bad (act consequentialism).
Overtime, I find some consistency in this too, which become my morals (rule consequentialism).
Morals and values don’t have to be objective, anymore than beauty does.
We try to bring value to the world, just as we try to beautify it.
For me, essentially morals and values are a response to the world, rather than mere emotional reactions to it.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with reacting to it.
There is a time for plans and principles, and there’s a time for reaction, improvisation, spontaneity
Not because God said, or because society, something external compelling us, but because that’s how we feel, that’s how we want things to be.
We’re never all going to agree, and we don’t have to, some conflict is unavoidable.
Would you not agree that these are values that you hold?
I would say that morals are grounded on ones values, if one possesses oneself. If not, a persons values are unknown to him and morals are imposed on him from the outside, which is deplorable and yet all too common.
So do I, with more and more succes over the years since I work with the self valuing logic.
Id be interested to learn where you are successful in finding consistency, and where it proves especially difficult.
I first had to discover how much of what I considered good is actually extremely bad for me. Im talking about the “love” given by certain people from my past - such “love” can be a true curse. When people value you in their terms, and when these terms are bad for you, and you go along with that, even in the slightest, that can ruin your life.
It is good to find out how people love you, what it is that they see in you. What they love in you may be your downfall or unhappiness or weakness. Especially the latter is common.
I find the dichotomy objective/subjective very problematic. Every statement requires a perspective, that seems to be an objective truth, yet it implies that truths must be subjective.
Values also determine which parts of the world come to us, arrive in our consciousness. So indeed it is more than a mere reaction.
And it is much easier to improvise and react with success if one has solid principles and a clear consciousness of them.
