Excursions of an Anti-Philosopher

… and then i was like ‘you know, B’s model could be used as a damn good analogy to account for and describe the history of philosophy.’ i suppose what had inspired me to do such a thing was my certainty that there is only one loosely defined ‘position’ that could be called ‘philosophical’; and that is nihilism. i set out not to say that philosophy wasn’t ‘real’, only that it couldn’t do what philosophers expected it to do. what they were expecting was a scientific understanding… but one that was unfortunately cloaked in what they liked to call ‘philosophy’… which they then set out to do by confusing methods without knowing it. they put empty philosophical concepts into logical form… followed the reasoning through to the conclusion-to-be, and then thought they had found and solved a real problem. but human beings didn’t just pop into existence from some primordial soup and start doing this nonsense. there’s a long story to this tragicomedy (being a nihilist - 'sup biggy nods - i simply adore the absurd, so this is why i call it a comedy) which i shall attempt to tell without reservation. it’s gonna move fast, so stay seated lest you fall off and eat the pavement.

to get a feel for where i’m coming from: this is a strongly (amateur, to be modest) wittgensteinian approach combined with some ideas put forth by a rather radical marxist/wittgensteinian Ph.D who claims… well, how could i capture such a leviathan of thought in a single post: anti-dialectics.co.uk/Rest_o … Twelve.htm

this characterizes the pre-enlightenment period (pre-baconian). distinctions between empirical and rational, a priori and a posteriori, inductive and deductive, analytic and synthetic, are not yet discovered. philosophy and mysticism are indistinguishable, aristotlean logic is thought to support and defend both western and eastern schools of thought. concepts are thought to be perfect representations of reality, mirroring it, and insofar as philosophical propositions retain logical coherency, philosophers believe their systems to be sensible. it is not yet known that these systems are ‘imposing’ concepts onto reality, not vice-versa, and therefore language is believed to give supra-sensible access to the nature of reality, to fixed ideas, which are there to be discovered by those with ‘special’ knowledge.

this characterizes the entrance into the ‘age of reason’, enlightenment, and science. distinctions are being developed between the categories described above, and philosophy becomes increasingly difficult in comparison to the former stage. the ‘sign’, which is here the philosophy-dogma that comes under the scrutiny of the new philosophical age, is now seen as so many systematic falsifications of truth. renewed skepticism, strengthening natural sciences, scientific method. a new problem evolves; philosophy loses credibility in describing nature, science takes over as a means of description, but cannot explain. a crisis; there must be a reality (obscure) that we are still unable to get at by either means.

enter age of post-structuralism. industrial revolution and commodification of ‘ideology’. second to last stage in philosophical timeline; stage one (philosophy-dogma) falls to the criticism of stage two (natural sciences)… stage two falls to the criticism of stage three (post-structuralism)… post-structuralism re-presents itself in commodified form as another ‘system’ of thought… the system of ‘no system’; an arbitrary image presented as a faithful copy of the progress made during the last two stages- philosophy as incredulous description, science as credible description without explanation. post-structuralism’s thesis; the explanation that there can be no explanation, or, several explanations that cannot be consolidated into one grand explanation. post-hoc digression back into pre-scientific stage; the obscure reality of nature which is inaccessible by both philosophy and science is now mirrored by artificially imposed concepts, this time taking the form of commodified symbols and monolithic copies of relic systems (‘neo’ philosophies). final movement of the third stage; positivism, ordinary language philosophy, deconstructionism. philosophical problems are thought to be ‘conceptual confusions’ that mirror the misuse of language rather than legitimate theoretical problems in understanding nature.

last development in intellectualism. neo-philosophies no longer need to pretend to be real because philosophers are so artificially confused they can no longer discern the difference between the copy they seek to reproduce and the original, empty form that copy will be a replication of. what is now real is the unreal… or the hyperreal; philosophy not as a disinterested examination of truth, but a reflection of the overwhelming linguistic and conceptual confusions of the individual thinker. modern philosophical activity becomes an unconscious attempt to model and copy the philosophical form while under the sublimating influence of a barrage of scattered ideas and nonsensical concepts, a residue left over, or rather created, by an almost infinite number of language game intersections that cannot be closed down or blocked by the real, because there is no real. the mapping now becomes the territory; philosophy as a hyperreal mirroring of itself as it maps itself mapping a territory that doesn’t exist.

imaginary conceptual problems philosophers grappled with nonetheless had an intense presence… which is to say, the state of perplexity was very real, even though the objects of this perplexity were not. if the state of confusion is real, it must necessarily represent a real problem, an this problem ‘gropes’ toward reality in the mind of the philosopher. couple this with my description of stage one above.

the dinstinctions between the scientific method and the philosophical method have dissolved (neither can both describe and explain). a third discipline emerges and is commodified, mass produced, ‘imitation philosophy’, a copy of a blend of both disciplines without specializing in either or recognizing where they are diametrically opposed.

this order characterizes what has happened after centuries of philosophical systems being ‘handled’ and ‘passed around’; none, which were obscure to begin with, retain any of their core confusions, so cannot be even apprehended as nonsense anymore (as was once possible in the second stage, the enlightenment, when science had not yet been stripped of its authority). now philosophers exist on a kind of plane of immanent confusion, which, paradoxically, presents everything as perfectly clear to the thinker precisely because there are no markers left to identify the real nature of it as nonsense.

final note: philosophy post-positivism is essentially metaphilosophy, which means it is not motivated by an earnest quest for truth, anymore. instead its activity involves the internal conflict the thinker experiences as the neurological ‘hardwiring’ for logic that his brain consists of, grapples with the inexplicably complex nature of language… a condition that has rapidly evolved over the last few thousand years. as a result, the metaprocess of philosophy is to reach a catharsis that consists of experiencing brief ‘certainty’ when the thinker’s faculties are able to streamline these conflicting neurological processes in his head so that they no longer conflict. for each thinker this state of ‘certainty’ is different; some can reach it even though the product of their thought is nonsense.

why philosophy still lives (as a ghost) is because, as explained before, there are no markers, no territories, for contrasting the map against the object the thinker believes he is mapping. one can no longer point and say ‘that is the wrong direction, the wrong way.’

instead, the thinker is mapping his mapping… and the consistency, coherency, of this mapping requires only that to the capacity of the thinker, he experiences no conflict between his rational faculties and his peculiar use of language.


shortly thereafter i was called upon by posterity to defend wittgenstein from russell:

that’s because he passed you, bert. he realized that philosophy can’t do what you’d like it to be able to do, and the fact that for you, philosophy has become a profession, makes you even less able to understand this. to admit that W was right, if you ever managed to understand how, would be like laying yourself off… and you wouldn’t dare do that.

now W isn’t saying to hell with philosophy, and you know this. he’s rather saying that your dream of a logically perfect language simply can’t be realized, and that what appear as the more important philosophical questions (ethical, political, metaphysical) only appear to be real questions because a confusion has resulted by a strange use of words. it is this confusion that creates the feeling that there is a ‘problem’, when there is not. there are no genuine philosophically ‘conceptual’ problems, only linguistic problems. philosophers that debate philosophical questions/answers aren’t in any real disagreement with each other on that account; they are instead involved in a closed off, internal dialogue with their own thinking, in which they take the interlocutor’s words, redefine them to fit into their own conceptual scheme, and then present an argument to that modified line of thinking. they simply take possession of the formerly confused and nonsensical philosophical statement, add their own unique confusion to it, and then provide a nonsensical response to the nonsensical content they’ve apprehended. the interlocutor then does the same, and process repeats.

see the ‘feeling’ of certainty, the feeling that a thought ‘makes sense’, doesn’t necessarily require that it be a statement that reflects or represents real states and events in the world. it can be induced by cognitive states, and these states are produced when a persons thinking processes do not conflict with themselves… which is to say, conceptualizations that have become partnered with certain words, and which do not produce any interference with the cohesion of these conceptualizations when grouped together, result in a feeling of correctness.

what prevents a philosopher from recognizing nonsense is this; he has already appropriated the statement by the time he comprehends it, and as such, fits it into his own cognitive structuring of sense. in this way, to say it again, he isn’t recognizing what the other had meant, but rather what he means once he’s taken possession of the statement. the ‘meaning’ i’m talking about when i just used the word ‘meant’, is that state of certainty… which is nothing more than what happens when there is nothing external to the thinker which can make certain the statement is indeed reflecting or representing anything about the world. ‘certainty’ is not the feeling of ‘knowing’ anything, but rather a peculiar state where one cannot know one is wrong because there is no way to check it outside of its being grammatically correct (its logical soundness and validity does not make it meaningful).

think of ‘words’ as being geometrical figures rather than containers of conceptual content… but first, think of conceptual content as being forms of ‘qualia’… not as sensations, but as (phenomenologically speaking) a recursive awareness of awareness of thinking. the inaudible sounds in your head. this stuff has no content in the way words have content and physical features. the ‘meaning’ of the word then does not exist in some cartesian space in your head which you can access at will. it exists in the physical consonant or dissonant feeling of certainty and ‘clarity’ produced when the neurological activity responsible for producing your thinking involves no ‘errors’ in its internal coding and decoding of meaningful content. for example, think of chomsky’s generative grammar theory stuff. rules of language encoded in the physiological structure of the brain so that basic elements of speech are intuitively recognized. now take a philosophical word like ‘mind’ and fit it into the category of things, of nouns. now even though a noun doesn’t have to be a physical person, place or thing, and can be a word that identifies one of these things… the word ‘mind’ can’t do the same, so a confusion results when talking about ‘mind’ in an unusual philosophical way. see ryle’s category mistake to understand this further… and anything you can find from peter hacker.

what i’m saying, and so many ordinary language philosophers before me as well, is that the bulk of philosophical language violates the rules of thinking, but also evades such rules by being so nonsensical as to be able to avoid detection; because it references nothing in the world, nothing in the world can therefore be used to ‘check’ it’s coherency and truthfulness, and it ‘glides across frictionless ice’, to not paraphrase W verbatim (i think).

“ah, i hadn’t thought of it like that. very wittgensteinean, dude.” - russell

of course, i’m straight gangsta, just like W.

Thank you for this gratuitous source of too-lengthy banquet food. But when we say “book”, don’t we speak of what is there for the senses? And when we speak of “motion”, don’t we mean something that is not only the sound of the words? One needs to distinguish language from speaking (hearing and processing) and from writing/reading.

We can have a sentence disconnected to the genuine experience of which it speaks, then we get sophistry. The serious issue is the substantive speech, and how it is language. Language means something that we can get wrong, but never right. It can link up to what is understood in life, but always correctly, by its own standard. This is a “man”, a “cow”, a “star”, “the world”. That simple issue about the Japanese talk of “the same” temple, where the Japanese didn’t assume the priority of “same stuff” over “same shape and purpose”, hints at the existence of Language. The warmth of the sunlight is like the pleasure of knowing after the cold of learning. Analogy can be thought as having a priority in what Language says rather than in speech or substance such that it first places us before these difficulties at all telling us what we are.

and thank you for the poetry reading after the final course.

of course, though that might be implicit in the speech gesture; it would go without saying that we at least believe the thing we call ‘book’ is real and something we’ve ‘sensed’. what we’re wanting to find out is in what kinds of ways statements can be made with the word ‘book’ in them, that are meaningful, and in what way they are meaningful. we are looking for the ‘edge’ where locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary tenses diverge… and where one or the other might lead to a non-literal sense, a metaphorical sense, or even a metaphysical sense. we’ve established the practical sense; ‘book’ means ‘what our behavior reveals of its use’. that is, we are not yet talking about the ontological features of its properties, or making emotive value statements about its quality or lack thereof, or calling to attention its importance to those who’ve read it. but when we do begin doing this, we’ve got to pay close attention to where that talk leads us. you could say there is no ‘wrong’ way to use the word ‘book’ if you keep in mind that there isn’t only one way, one language game, with which we talk about it. what we’re concerned with is; mistaking one kind of language game for another, which could result in confusion or nonsense. fortunately there aren’t many philosophical statements that can be made about a book, save something metaphysical pertaining to its ‘essence’ or ‘being’, or a statement purporting to give it ‘value’ in some objective sense.

here’s one to demonstrate non literal and implicit meaning that is ‘legal’, you might say. in this one i (paradoxically) don’t ‘look behind the words’ for the meaning, but don’t get the meaning directly from the words, either.

  1. he can read him like a book

well, no he can’t, because he’s not a book. what he’s saying without saying is; he is no mystery or he is not complicated.

but now why should i associate ‘reading like a book’ with something that isn’t complicated or a mystery? what leads me from that to this? imagine me saying that to a five year old. he’d not know what i meant. how then is the meaning of such a statement ever learned? it must be an implicit kind of rule following and correspondent behavior that is socially shared and learned. here, even though i can’t take the meaning in a literal sense, i know quite obviously what it means… and i do so by the way such a phrase is used.

what about a statement like this:

the world which we perceive is characterized by great diversity, but this diversity is not fundamental. fundamentally the world is a unity (schopenhaur, btw).

not only is this statement literally meaningless, but it has no non literal meaning either. that is, i can’t know it’s literally true because i have no way to check and be sure the world isn’t, in fact, diverse rather than a unity. what if that statement were flipped? the million dollar question is; could that statement be wrong, and would i even notice the difference if it was? no amount of rule following or shared/learned language could ever get me to an explicit or implicit understanding of what that meant. there are as many compelling arguments that the world is fundamentally diverse rather than unified. and why are these arguments compelling? what is the mystique of such a philosophical statement? that it’s so nonsensical it can’t even be wrong. it stands like a statue, untouchable and steadfast in our gaze, holding us in absolute awe. what a profound statement, we think.

what captures us is not the substance of the statement (of which there is none), but the form of it… the grammar of it, the eloquence of it. but if we then closely scrutinize the statement, the philosophical circus begins; well there is only a field, that’s what the physicists say. yeah but the field consists of individual points that are different on account of their being in different relative locations. no that doesn’t make them different. well it depends on what you mean by different. i mean they’re the same things, only in different places. yeah but how could the same thing be in two different places. there aren’t different places, dude. i just told you it’s a field. yeah but how big is this field and where is it. it’s everywhere and inconceivably big. is there any distance between one area of it and another? well yeah, its huge. so then there are different places within it? no… i mean yeah, … dude, all i’m saying is that there is only one fundamental ‘thing’ and that’s the field. well what’s in this field? particles man, i just told you! no you said points don’t exist… you said only the field exists. i mean it’s a field of particles but they’re all part of the same field. that’s different. how is it different? because now there’s many things rather than one thing. DUDE ITS MANY THINGS IN ONE THING. so there is diversity? depends on what you mean by ‘diversity’, dude!..

rinse and repeat, ad nauseam.

alright that’s quite enough of that. moving on.

what your statement logically implies is that ‘analogy doesn’t have priority in speech or substance’ and that ‘speech and substance’ is not equivalent to ‘what language says’, and that ‘telling us what we are’ is a ‘difficulty’ because of this.

i think i’ve got the notational form… but i haven’t a clue what it means.

It is said there are as many definitions of ‘what is philosophy’ as the number of people who attempted to define it.

It is a fact, “philosophy” is a very loose term but you are too quick to straight-jacket ‘what is philosophy’ into merely one pigeon hole and critique philosophy based on that narrow definition. There are still positive in Western Academic Philosophy, but in general academic philosophy at present is filled with bastardized incestuous practices.

I have analyzed more than 500 definitions of ‘what is supposedly to be Philosophy’ from Western, Eastern and everywhere re ‘what is philosophy’ and noted there is an essence to all these definition of ‘what is philosophy’.

One point is the essence of ‘what is Philosophy’ is a primary subset of ‘what is life’.

The essence of philosophy is;
whatever [tools, knowledge, practices, wisdom, etc.] it takes at the meta-level to ensure the optimization of one’s and the collective’s well-being.

This is why it is very common to precede any aspect of life with the term ‘Philosophy’ i.e. Philosophy of X, where ‘X’ can be anything toward the positive and well-being.

From the above, I would not be any anti-philosopher.

what if it has always been filled with such things, even as far back as the ancient greeks? what if the entire edifice of ‘traditional western philosophy’ was founded on a purposeful and systematic distortion of ordinary communal language? if we begin, as marx did, with the premise that language first evolves as a means of interaction and communication for people involved in various kinds of material relations, we could then trace the development of certain kinds of ‘language’ in direct proportion to the speaker’s involvement with those relations. so, if you have a class of people who desire to be exempt from the necessity of labor, for example, you might see them develop a language which attempts to justify that. so now we’ve got to separate which parts of philosophy reflect the disinterested curiosity about the world and produce genuine, honest confusions - say, the pre-socratic battle between those philosophers who thought change was impossible, and those who thought is wasn’t - and which parts are motivated by the philosopher’s contempt for ordinary language and those who practice it. a perfect example of this would be plato’s program; the ‘special’ privilege of the ‘philosopher king’, the aristocratic soul who is above the menial life of the average citizen. so if one wanted to maintain one’s advantage of being free from the requirement of general labor, they’d develop a philosophy that supplanted and supported that advantage, that rationalized it, that defended that right. such a person would need to design a special field distinct from the natural sciences (which are what could be characterized as forms of real work; take aristotle’s taxonomy… honest, productive and useful) which could be thought to be as important as the natural sciences and therefore deserving of a class of specialists who would be responsible for ‘developing’ it.

but what if the stuff of this new discipline had absolutely no contact with the real world, but was, unlike science, nothing more than a systematic imposition of ‘concepts’ onto the world rather than a careful reading of concepts derived from the world, as is the case for true science.

more later. gotta roll.

That’s interesting Promethaen 75, perhaps the answer lies in the human bicameral mind, of an early try to describe reality both ways.

The term was coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean …

Von Neuman. architecture proves the effects of simulated causitive factors.

Grammar has a more simple meaning. Aristotle doesn’t distinguish grammar from syntax in Chomsky’s sense of Universal Grammar. There are nouns, and when time is added there are verbs, and there is the way they fit in the sentence. The more primitive issue is the manner in which the verb is separated out from the noun. This is the sense in which the word book is already a metaphor for the primordial word which is neither noun nor noun plus time.

Of course, it is true, that for cultural analysis one can look at metaphor in the sense of transfer of meaning and derive many things, such as the place of rats in the Chinese world. But there, everything that the transfer of meaning shows, could be derived as well behaviorally. Once I saw a foul rat rubbing its dirty cold body against a washing machine in a Chinese laundry. “A rat!” I said to the Chinese attendant. She said, with undisturbed disinterest, “Yea, a big one”, and turned back to her phone just as though it were a stray house cat.

I must tell you, Meno, I have read this work. By Cicero’s time the “ego arbiter” was simply placed in where the Greeks speak still of the gods in the sense of the Euthyphro. This is strange, the gods, the ones who save us from becoming befouled or stained by misama, is more conscious in Socrates than in the others! Here he speaks of his δαιμονία. This is a momentous psychic upheaval ( I am the first to take notice of this, but little enough advantage has yet been gained from this observation ). On can suppose a steady change in the ground of this conscience into our own time, and back to the so-called bicameral age. However, this thesis is loose enough.

i actually spent some time looking at that bicameral mind theory long ago, but concluded it wouldn’t be able to help me in my thesis that the vast majority of philosophical language is nonsense. i do believe the philosophical tendency is hardwired in our brains, though. similar to that lateralization of brain function jaynes speaks of… but concerning different regions which were not yet ‘primed’ for action when man was at the stage jaynes talks about. while i think the higher level cognitive faculties - the ability to think analytically and logically - were already present, the language content didn’t yet exist which would fill those structures with content, you might say. man needs a much broader vocabulary before he can commit to making philosophical nonsense. once language has reached a level of maturity, then the various ways in which nonsense can be produced becomes possible. simply said, it isn’t usually the reasoning that is flawed; the rules of grammar employed in doing philosophy are correct. it’s the non-sensical (and nonsensical) semantic content when put to the form of the rules, that creates the illusion that something meaningful is said. and by meaningful i generally mean; in correspondence with things and events in the world. by ‘meaningless’ i would generally mean; not in correspondence with the world, but perfectly internally consistent and rule-following, nonetheless. you’ve probably noticed this is in line with the basic gist of positivism, though i’m not as stringent as the positivists. i would allow for different kinds of language games, as wittgenstein did, and would only pay more attention to the illegal intersections between them… which is what produces such linguistic confusions. and these are EVERYWHERE in the fora. you’d have to recruit a small army of analysts to handle them all.

but no, i don’t think jaynes is an ‘answer’, and i wasn’t really asking a question. it isn’t a mystery to me why the problems of philosophy exist.

here’s something i wrote elsewhere about some of that bicameral mind theory. see if you get what i’m saying and tell me if you agree.

something doesn’t pan out in the part about ‘unquestioningly obeying’ the commands made in the auditory hallucinations. he explains volition at this point as simply an autonomous reaction occurring without any ‘reflection’ of thought. ah, but wait a minute. in order for the person to be motivated to obey rather than disobey, there must have already developed a cursory condition of moral awareness in the person… which means, he is aware enough in an autobiographical sense (and with memory) to know in advance of negative consequences for not obeying… or else he wouldn’t be so adamant about obeying. see, he’s already adapted a learned behavior through some degree of social discourse which necessarily involves reflective reasoning and is therefore ripe with cognitive content. at this level he might be unable to question the basis of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behavior, but he is certainly able to remember negative consequences he’s experienced in similar contexts when he did not concur with a demand/command made in social discourse, somewhere. of course, this primitive, reflexive reasoning is not as complex as higher, analytical frontal cortex stuff, but it possesses cognitive content just the same. the person has developed a learned behavior, is aware of it, and can remember similar instances in the past. the person would most certainly be able to ‘give an account’ of why they acted as they did. the variability of the language they use to ‘think’ about this account is irrelevant here; this person is applying very basic reasoning skills when he modifies his behavior to accommodate any command he might have heard… auditory hallucination or not.

I think Guide’s analysis should precede Yours, but since it does not preclude Yours, I will try to include both generally or specifically, wherever such may serve the main outline of this forum.

Simplification is of the essence, since the very widely scoped ideas appear to converse periodically, just as simulation varies between more cognitive, other times more behavioral tangents. But tangent is really the kind of misuse which confirms a replication of the kind that the Greek symbolism does not at this stage concern with, the gods as archytipical auto visual presentations of a different kind one would expect in the advanced cognitive disassociation between held tacit knowledge of promorphic , and hallucinate communication , albeit being visual, as in the Narcissus myth.

The godess’ jealous fury at a shared objectvisation of seeing the other in a reflection, is not a case of auditory hallucination, but a denial of that false simulation. This could be seen, even at the time of Cicero, to be the most adept use of simulated ideation, where both the goddess and the self image are coalesced into a singular aspect , founding the jellousy the object relation, and the autipromorphism simultaneously. What that simultainity means, we can re-form it metaphorically to suit Jung, but we can never do it reversely, by trying to find other particular basis.

That there was not enough content there, is as questionable than stating that logical consistency was already predicated, albeit merely in terms of common sense, and the commonest of that sense describes the current outline with devolving hallucinatory experience, where more common sense evolves out of shared experiential meaning.

The simulations and the simulates evolve in three thousand years, and utilized within the modus operans of much more auditory signaling of simulacra, wherein, music has always exhibited more bearing onmeaningful and sensible signposts for memory processing.

The most well known one is the invention of differential and integrative processes, thought up by a man who based mathematical symbols on musical sound organizations.

At any time prior, organizing principles via systems of pattern differentiation had content, and would not the proposition that at any point between categarizations of preconscious and conscious there are conflations of variability again via usage between relating patterns of significance, where the earliest rubric of signs can be apprehended?

That cognitive content of signs and signals are tied to their variable rules of usage, is the mode of transmitting the content, irrespective of the level of metaphore, may be reinterpreted in terms of appealing to the communicand by to communicator, or, reversely, adapting situationally to bicameral contexts to enhance wider relevance mat also underscore meaning.

I believe an appeal to positivism was a thought game situational occurance, caused by an obvious need to modify or even suppress misinterpretation, as was in the case of Wagner contra Nietzsche, and even Heidegger contra Nietzsche.

This procedural predelictipn was useful at a time when the importance of sensible content invaded the misuse of bracketing them. into schematic orders , which aided and abetted signifiers used within marginal content.

I do not call all sensible send philosophy, but at the same time can not exclude it from adaptibility within totally disparaging contexts either. Popular philosophy is popular, yes, and Nihilism has had a very general readership, but adapting it to a reverse situation of pre formal , undifferentiated content, may not re-create the absolute basis, as in the creation of very wide metaphors which loose format can begin to see I. Narcissus, as someone who can differentiate a goddess’s jealousy of some one who herself does not understand to be other than the person she is supposedly in love with.

So the imposition of conceptual reality is a necessary process, began more appearently before what came to be known as the age of reason, and this is where the answer of simulation comes up as well, and reality itself changes along with it.

Philosophy had to use no-sense metaphore, and become prophetic, by drawing lines of continuous sense, regardless of current interpretation, because it became a need for an expanding and relevant widening of the axis of the metaphor.

That many of similar strands and families are reconstructed in many more ways, represents the widening significance of wider ranging referential signification.

Along with it the notion that primordial thought was once totally behavioristic, and those patterns formed relevant forms of connections with their more richly symbolic counterpart.

Your message is significant, namely even the philosopher Jesus spoke in parables of common sense, or Nietzsche in aphorisms. They had to, and misrepresentation at times turned into calamity. The God is dead, the metaphysics is dead, even the philosophy is dead motive to undermine either an original unity or a mess of intellectual contraption is mis Guided, in this age of collusion and confusion and even complacency.

Its none of us are to blamed for content that we predicated, while held responsible for, but its a case of a process of strongly held presumptive referendum, to fill in all the forgotten variables to enable the most real appearing simulacrum to make the necessary sense to keep though processes from suffering social disassociatuons from mirroring personal ones, as did the goddess misunderstand the object of her relation to a self which didn’t exist apart from his reflective simulation. That she was not a real goddess is obvious for if she could not understand this, how could she understand the object of her love, nor her own feelings of jealousy?

Actually re reading what I wrote satisfies my cursory method of signification by the widest metaphore, but, admittedly answers by posing newer questions.

Try more specificity next, using the very absurd notions of critical philosophy.

In a way the trend was set when Plato started the Academy, then the neoPlatonic Academy to the current practices of Western Academic Philosophy where one has to be a member of a ‘clan’, conform to its expectations and having to pat each other’s back all the time.

Meanwhile what is philosophy-proper inherently and naturally continue to evolve within humanity on its own.

Note before Plato’s Academy, Greek Philosophy was heavily influenced by Indian Philosophies which had stretched back thousands of year before Plato. The Indian and the Chinese were doing and practicing philosophy-proper.

Philosophy-proper is a natural inherent faculty and drive within all human beings whilst very active in SOME.
Philosophy-proper is almost next to breathing, thus there is no question of anti-philosopher just as there is no anti-breathing nor anti-breather.

yeah, pris567, there was a lot of that going on back in BC (before christ, not british columbia). i mean it wasn’t as if socrates was the first person to ask ‘why’. but allocating the sources of philosophy to one region or another does not make any single party responsible for the mess philosophy has become. you can’t blame the indians, arabs or asians for the greek’s mass confusion. all we can say is that the stuff of ‘a priori’ dogmatism, which is the heart of philosophy, gets established wherever civilizations are being divided between classes… out of which emerges first that order of philosophy that is used to preserve the power of the elite (remember the egyptian guy who abolished polytheism and made himself the voice of the ‘single’ god? that’s a clue to the general direction philosophy would take). generally the ruling class philosophy will develop out of the metaphysical notion that civil order is a reflection of ‘divine’ order… whether it be ordained by a ‘god’ or some rational dynamic that orders the universe (logos, for instance). once this is set in place, all subdivisions of philosophy will proceed directly from that premise; ethics will be a branch of keeping the classes in their proper place and with proper order and conduct (legalism and confucianism, for example), metaphysics and epistemology will be subordinate to ethics, it’s purpose to find the source and nature of knowledge so that one can’t mistake what one’s place is in society. these two, epistemology and metaphysics, have as their task to hide from people pure nihilism, which an organized civilization absolutely cannot be permitted to embrace (as that would mean the dominating classes would have to struggle for their power against lawlessness and anarchy).

anyway, let’s use that infamous word ‘objective’ as an example of the abusive nature of philosophy toward language. but note first how the word can mean many different things in philosophy, depending on how its used. you might find whitehead, quine, james, schlick, quine, pierce, and any number of other philosophers disagreeing with what that word means. what each is doing is using the word in a way that will never reach a terminus and will remain open to countless aporias, depending on and developing from what statements follow to explain the former meaning of the use of the word. derrida’s criticism of the philosophical narrative being always open ended is an expression of this problem in praxis.

okay so the question of ‘objectivity’ arises when we are forced to concede the existence of a world independently of our experience of it, with the problem of being able to make truth statements about that world that are not conditioned by personal prejudice, preference, bias or opinion. and this problem is not solved by dividing statements of facts from statements of value, as even some statements of impartial fact are dubious; what is the true color of the ball, for instance. neither do deductive statements tell us anything about the world. sure, it is objectively true that all bachelors are unmarried men, but such a statement doesn’t tell us anything about bachelors and unmarried men… only that these two terms are synonymous.

the resolution of the problem of objectivity really comes down to taking a radical anti-psychologistic position and claiming that not only do the rules of logic exist independently of the ‘mind’, but they are also the only ‘things’ that can be objective. so any statement about the world will conform to rules of logic which we all recognize, but will not necessarily say anything true about the world. in that case, it would be incorrect to say that the world consists of ‘things’ (for how can we be sure our statements actually represent such things?). rather, the world consists of ‘facts’… which means, our language reflects and expresses the logical form which truth statements take, not the things in the world about which the logical statement’s are made.

you might say that our language reflects the logical structure of the world, but not the world’s content. because of this, language can’t be representational… its meaning must be derived from its use, and this use-meaning is bound up in an inexplicably complicated ‘way of life’ (W) which conforms to various kinds of rule-following. the issue with a great degree of ‘philosophical’ statements is that they conform to such rules but are in fact empty of content; they masquerade as empirical propositions and are anything but. when we see such statements, we are taken in, seduced by, the grammatical form of them; they ‘check out’ upon first glance and are thought to be capable of being either true or false (while in fact, they are so nonsensical they can’t be either). but understanding this is level nine philosophy and requires a bit of palm grease, which big rosa will briefly demonstrate here:

anti-dialectics.co.uk/Why_al … al_Truths_

now if one were to attempt a rebuke against my ridiculous claim that ‘philosophy is nonsense’, they’d ask me this simple question: wouldn’t you have to draw a rigid line between ordinary language and philosophical so that we know where ordinary language ends and philosophical language begins?

and to this question i’d be like ‘damn, you had to ask me that, didn’t you’ and i would immediately fail to deliver the goods. i would only be able to say that philosophical language has to be analyzed on a case by case basis, which would take a small eternity to do. meanwhile, there is one consistency i will always have, and one thing i will always promise to do in all circumstances… and that is, make philosophy fun (because that’s what you all want, anyway… ‘truth’ be damned). and i’d imagine that none of you are in a hurry to be proved wrong, so this shouldn’t be a problem. once in a while i might reach my hand into the ILP basket and pull out something to mess with. kind of like a luck of the draw thing. it might be something you said, or something the other guy said. no way to know. i will then spend a post or two examining the stuff, suggest how it might be incomprehensible garbage (which will go in one ear and right out the other), and then move on once it is conformed that you don’t understand. but again, whatever happens, its gonna be fun for everyone. that is my promise to ILP.

The childish idea, in play here, that what isn’t about measurement (“science”) is “nonsense” has no merit. And the rest seems to be based on a naive reading of Hume. No reward could atone for the boredom and waste of time resultant in immersing one’s ears in such muck.

Even though this statement doesn’t fit the case, still, it might as well. Actually, the statement reminds of Plato and Aristotle’s quarrel about the limit of the in-between (doxa and wisdom) state of man.

The fundamental dichotomy within philosophy has always been the

  1. Philosophical Realists camps [Parmenides - independent reality, et al] versus
  2. Philosophical anti-realists camps [Heraclitus - co-dependent reality, et al]

It is the philosophical realists camp who in subsequent era and years attempted to make objectivity as objective as possible with the linguistic turn
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn - Rorty, etc.
then to the logical positivists - Vienna Circle, etc.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism
While there are success elements from the above, these success are limited because they failed to take subjectivity into account at the meta- level.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution emphasized the subject as critical to knowledge and cognition and this was subsequent revitalized after the failure to the linguistic turn to deal with the finer aspects of philosophy-proper.

The fact is, objectivity from a meta-analytical level is fundamentally subjective, i.e. objectivity is intersubjectivity at a meta-level.

The subjects are always part and parcel of reality-as-it-is, thus reality cannot be independently separated from the subjects at the finer and ultimate level.

Philosophy-proper [not academic philosophy] deal with objectivity as intersubjectivity. This perspective and approach is more efficient in producing optimal well-being for the individual and the collective.

Efficient in producing results meant directing attention on the subjects [know thyself] and changing whatever necessary variables within the subjects to produce the necessary expected results.
Just imaging the results when the average intelligent of humans [IQ] are increased by 100% from the current status and the Moral Quotient {MQ} increased by 500% and the achievement of exponential increments in other positive human quotients [whatever-Q].

Since philosophy-proper is effective and result-orientated it would not be wise to assign any ‘anti’ element to it. Thus no ‘anti-philosopher’ as such.

there are deceptive motives behind this movement of philosophy that took direction in kant to revitalize the concept of the ‘subject’ after the empiricists shut it down. kant was working backwards… he set his conclusion up before his premises; he realized the danger to morality this presented, and then set out to argue the ‘subject’ back to life, as something transphenomenal… calling the categories and faculties of reason something that structures knowledge, rather than vice versa. this entire ontology wasn’t invented for the purposes of clearing up epistemological problems (of which there were none), but for reaching the conclusion kant already set up before he even began; that man had to be made ‘free’ so that he could be made responsible. this was the only way to save morality, the only way to survive what spinoza had done a century earlier. but spinoza was the end of ontology, and nobody since has gotten past him, nor will they.

that said, i no longer entertain dualistic philosophies which try to give precedence to the ‘subject’. there is no ‘subject’… this is just something necessary for grammar. the separation of the ‘doer’ from the deed, to speak with nietzsche, is one of the great errors in philosophy that cannot be avoided. but it is an error nonetheless.

you’re doing fine, guide, so just relax. believe me, i’m doing everything i can to convince myself that you aren’t one of the Po-Jama People, because i like you. PLEASE don’t blow it, man.

I consider myself a reasonable expert on Kantian philosophy.
Earlier in his career, Kant was an anti-empiricist and was a pro-rationalist [reason only]. But after he was awoken from his dogmatic rationalist slumber by Hume, Kant went on to reconcile the [seemingly impossible] gap between the empirical and the rational, i.e. both must work complementarily to optimize life.

Kant directed attention to the categories as the foundation of knowledge and morality but he could not go further due to the limitations of his time.
But at present we can exploit Kant as the foundation and ride on the wave of an exponential expansion of knowledge, notably,

  1. The complete mapping of the Human Genome, once thought impossible.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project

  2. The advancing mapping of the Human Brain.
    humanconnectomeproject.org/

The focus of philosophy [encompassing] has to be on the subject, especially on the above advances which will enable the following results to ensue.

Efficient in producing results meant directing attention on the subjects [know thyself] and changing whatever necessary variables within the subjects to produce the necessary expected results.
Just imaging the potentials when
the average intelligent of humans [IQ] are increased by 100% from the current status and
the Moral Quotient {MQ} increased by 500% and
the achievement of exponential increments in other positive human quotients [whatever-Q].

Since philosophy-proper is effective and result-orientated it would not be wise to assign any ‘anti’ element to it. Thus no ‘anti-philosopher’ as such.

I don’t think Nietzsche separated the doer from the deed, but rather the doer and deeds are relative [related] to each other within the relevant perspective.
It is not about merely talk of dualism, monism and whatever ‘ism’ but philosophy-proper must involve real positive changes to the subject’s brain and self in terms of practices, physical and mental.
This is what is happening with the fundamentals of Eastern Philosophies which involve the engineering of the practical man. I believe it was the same with Western Philosophy until it took the academic and linguistic turn ending with “incestuous” practices restricted only to qualified professional philosophers.

what are the 'foundations of knowledge"? what does that even mean? are we asking what makes us know, or how we can know, or what it is that we know? when we make epistemological queries like this, we seem to think that we can get out of the language we use to frame the question, and behind it, as if we might find something that sits separate from language which could then be pointed at by that language, something not of the language itself; here is the noumena, the thing-in-itself, and when i speak of it, i represent it with my language. here the noumena, there the language. this is an error. to speak of something that cannot be known while at the same time claiming that it exists, is nonsense. it was this conceptual confusion that kant got tangled up in when he stood frozen between rationalism and empiricism. he thought; if it is my mind that organizes the raw data of perception into meaningful knowledge, my knowledge will only ever provide for me the appearance of what the ‘thing’ is when it is perceived. this is to say there is something about the thing that i can’t know, and i must know this because my senses can deceive me. something has to be what it is, although i might not ever get to that knowledge because i can only know how it appears to me.

but the thing is nothing more than how it appears, and it gives itself entirely to the senses. the entire edifice of phenomenology from plato to kant rests on a representational use of language. this would be to use language to invent a concept, place the concept beyond and outside of language, and then try to get back to it with that language. but it never left the language in the first place.

philosophers invent such super-empirical concepts and make them ‘foundations’ for knowledge… then they proceed to think that when they speak of such concepts, they are ‘explaining’ how knowledge can be gained through them… when in fact, their speaking with such terms does not get at explanations, but only descriptions of how those super-empirical words are used in the philosophical language. philosophy cannot provide a ‘foundation’ for knowledge, for to get to such a foundation philosophy must be able to reach both sides of it… it must be able to get out of its language for a moment and say ‘we’ve found where our language ends and where the world starts.’ but it cannot do this.

we are not looking for the foundations of knowledge with philosophy (as this cannot be done), but the foundation of philosophy in language. and the foundation for philosophy (or let me say the biggest ‘problems’ philosophy believes it has found), rests entirely in a gross bewitchment of language. philosophy’s task should be to untangle nonsense, not create more. it’s done quite enough of that already.

what this should mean is; we can talk meaningfully with the use of the reflexive pronoun ‘I’ without having to scratch our heads over cartesian problems and wonder what we mean when we use the word. and there are many ways in which we can do this without ever arriving at a question of what the word ‘I’ means… only how it is used.

what nietsche did was dissolve a philosophical problem that was persisting long before he showed up on the scene. he was eliminating the metaphysical content philosophers had given to the ‘subject’ as something that stands in an acausal relationship with the world, as descartes and plato before him would believe. it was the ‘soul superstition’ that nietzsche was disposing of, and he did so in a very simple and eloquent way. if you recall the aphorism in which he explains how the doer is separated from the deed… and he uses lightening as an example.

we see lightening strike and say ‘there is the lightening, and striking is what it has just done’. we call the lightening the subject and the striking the predicate… but this is just a convention in language. there isn’t really a ‘thing’ that does something such that without doing what it has done we would still be able to say the thing exists. the lightening could not be without its striking. it is the striking. there is only the striking.

the metaphysical concept of the subject, of the ‘self’, is something that has evolved in western philosophy as a result of an honest confusion. it wasn’t contrived, i mean. it was a concept arrived at after a misunderstanding of what experience is, and lends itself to that peculiar instance of self awareness. one thinks of a pre-reflective cogito that stands apart from the body and not only ‘watches’ what the body does, but also ‘makes’ it do what it does. in the platonic and cartesian sense, the ‘self’ inhabits the body and interacts with it causally. this is a mistake which spinoza cleared up. there is no cartesian second substance, and there is no freewill.