Did they say anything that really changed your life?

Has anyone on a forum, whether ILP or another, ever stated something that really changed your life?
Not a poster repeating what a known philosopher said, more like the poster’s own take on the issue.

i wouldn’t say ‘changed my life’, but i’d say changed my perspective on philosophy, which indirectly changed my life… being that i’m a philosophically minded person. posted on the my first philosophy forum when i was 27. ‘the cry’ it was called. existentialism stuff. from there i found myself at ‘the philosophy cafe’ (where i met biggy, btw). where did the years go, biggs? sigh

so i’ve been around, and i’ve seen it all; every size, shape and color of philosophy. but it wasn’t until i found the sixth degree blackbelt in logic and analytical philosophy ‘rosa lichtenstein’ at revleft sometime around 03-04, that i experienced one of those profound ‘eureka’ moments (or several, rather). i’d have to say of all the characters i’ve ever met on the fora, this one had the greatest impact on me. since then my entire understanding of philosophy has changed significantly. i know now that philosophy isn’t what i thought it was before i had the great fortune of seeing this master ‘in action’ against what i had thought, at the time, were instances of meaningful philosophical activity. you might say i became much more critical of philosophy… and as a result of this new found ability to use the analytical tools i had acquired (to the extent that i was able to understand them) in examining the philosophy i observed across the fora, i experienced a drastic reorientation concerning the theories i’d form to explain why, and how, so much philosophical nonsense could be possible (which is what i now understood so much of it to be). as my focus on philosophy waned, by interest in psychology increased; i retained a general interest in the people i’d meet across the fora… but in knowing, now, how confused and irrational much of the philosophy i was seeing was, i had to find an explanation for how, and why, people could be that confused and irrational. my interests then became a study not in philosophy per se, but maybe rather in sociology. i began looking for ‘types’ of people, themes, language style and idiosyncrasy, repetitious patterns of certain, particular lines of erroneous reasoning, and especially the mechanics of traditional ‘super-narratives’ that i could identify as conceptual traps, you might say, that i observed so many people being unknowingly caught in. but the beauty of all this is that while i might be perceived as having a new found cynicism/skepticism of the philosophical kind, my interest in philosophy has actually increased, because i have found new subject matter quite different from what i had previously believed was legitimate philosophy, and my interest in philosophy was/is renewed. ironically, i have those who i’ve been observing for so long, to thank, since without them - as a kind of ‘case study’ - i wouldn’t have been able to reach the heights/depths of critical thought against what is typically understood as philosophy, by them, and what i now understand philosophy to be (if that makes any sense).

so my relationship to philosophy fora is best described as multi-faceted and ambiguous. you could say that i’ve learned more from people’s mistakes than i have from their truths… which are usually obvious and constitute nothing extraordinary (the last extraordinary moves in philosophy were made 75 or so years ago). today, as a magnificent case study of epic proportions, the public practice of philosophy i observe on the fora brings me to the conclusion that traditional philosophy prior to the analytical revolution does… quite literally… split intelligent people into compartmentalized and compounded states that can almost be described as neurotic. something that ‘brings out’ or makes visable certain core features of personality, or soul, or ethos. it is the urgency with which people hold fast to their erroneous reasoning that must have an explanation. when one recognizes, as i have, that it can’t be logically consistent reasoning that beings such people to these senseless conclusions, it must be something else. here is where i become the psychologist and set philosophy aside for a moment. i ask; who is this person, and why are they making this kind of error. what has happened to this person for this particular narrative, rather than this other narrative, to have been able to capture and possess them completely. then i am able to draw inferences from various associations between the type of person and the specific ‘philosophy’ they hold fast to… and say ‘ah, this is why they believe x and not y’.

yeah so essentially i’m saying over the years i’ve become involved in practicing a kind of philosophy that is engaged not with doing philosophy as much as examining the kinds of nonsense it produces and the specific kinds of people who consistently produce those kinds of nonsense. maybe the philosophy of anti-philosophy, then? a critical look at language use and the peculiar kinds of confusion it creates… while keeping in mind the clear distinctions between propositions belonging to the natural sciences, and propositions of the general philosophical sort. it isn’t that philosophy is ‘wrong’… but rather that it tries to do what it can’t do… and/or claims to have done what it hasn’t. so when you see somebody doing it ‘badly’, you get a look into the mind and psychology of the person and can sometimes become able to deduce why a particular pattern of thinking is so consistent. hence, the transition into psychology from philosophy. once we discover that something is nonsense, we no longer look for any clarification (since there can be none for nonsense), but instead for the cause of that confusion… most of which emerges from various emotional forces rather than intellectual. i’d sooner ask why one would want to believe what they do, rather than coming to the conclusion that they believe it because it’s reasonable/rational. errors in reasoning do not come about arbitrarily; they are structured by deeper elements of the personality and emotional constitution of the confused thinker in question.

here’s a brief exploration of some of this… something half satire, half incredibly serious. though i chose to write it casually because i’d not expect it to be well received: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=194713

anywho, that’s my story. what i was, and what i’ve become. i no longer see ‘philosophy threads’, but couches… where people sit down and tell me things they don’t know they’re telling me in ways they’d not think they were able to tell me. and there is no malevolence in any of this; i genuinely believe the animal ‘man’ is good… that he ‘means well’, despite his idiocy and foolishness. btw, i count the more intelligent as the bigger idiots; they shouldn’t be as foolish as they are. this is why i insist that philosophy has become something of an affliction for them and is largely responsible for turning them into what they are. that, and their own individual ‘struggle’ (whether severe or not), which is the thing that has colored their soul and brought them to their unique emotional character. i fear that most are not happy, possess no authentic ‘loftiness’ of spirit, and are consumed by anger, envy and resentment/ressentiment. to not be filled with these things is as difficult as it is dangerous, because the truth… the Truth… knowing it, will crush almost anyone who finds it.

philosophy as ‘how many ways can i lie to myself to make my life bearable’ is usually what i find in the market place. but i still love it when i see it. this is what people do because they have to do it, to make it through. i totally get that.

Satyr (Know Thyself forum) changed my perspective on modern society and James S. Saint (ILP) was a super, smart, science guy who awed me.

where I am philosophically today is almost all self taught, and I consider my niches second to none…

What I learned most from everyone!!!

Was method.

Not the ideas.

Method.

That is a debt very hard to repay.

I used to make these massive rambling 50 page posts when I first arrived here…

Now I usually use a couple sentences or a paragraph …

That’s all method.

I learned to say the most in as clear a way as possible from pressure from all the members here.

I hope I even get better at this as I age.

I do still get mad at people… but being a hyper empath, I not only always feel attacked, I absorb the internal states of the species at large and can project them on the world stage.

As I age, I grow out of the worst parts of me and this species. Hopefully for some type of beneficial purpose.

Short answer, I’m a student of you all.

I don’t know how you’ll interpret this, but be careful with what I quoted. It’s okay to know the ‘engineering’ part, but that can be one of the biggest traps of all. Spend too much time with types, themes, language, patterns, etc., and next thing you know you’re doing psychological grunt work. Not a nice place to be especially when you have to go AFK. I hope you get the picture.

Yes, but again, make sure the inferences are not wholly engineering-derived. Hyper-philosophical predators can smell that miles away.

Precisely. Understand language as a form of engineering then you see part of my reason for the previous responses.

Extremely fine line, almost invisible, between the two.

Good. Makes things a whole lot easier. :slight_smile:

Ms. Darling

Satyr? Yes, I know Mr. Apostolakos. He joined PF in the first year, 2002, some months after I did.

We’ve had extensive conversations in the past. I didn’t particularly care for his, shall we say, oeuvre of astringency over at KT, never joined. Earlier on before KT he was still spiky but at times he showed a more relaxed, poetic side which in some ways is where I thought he revealed more of the heart of the matter. But don’t tell him I said that, I don’t want him coming around and start playing the Italian Death Metal of Julius Evola. At this point in life I’m comfortable enough with, Good Morning, Starshine.

With lyrics like:

Gliddy glub gloopy, nibby nabby noopy la, la, la, lo, lo
Sabba sibby sabba, nooby abba nabba, le, le, lo, lo

Now that’s a song Wittgenstein would have enjoyed. :slight_smile:

By the way, re “intruding on familial goings on”, if it were strictly so it wouldn’t be on the website.

That’s a quick word covering a lot of territory. I’ll leave it for now.

If you want beneficial purpose, that’s what you’ll get. There’s a saying: “What you’re looking for, is looking for you.”

And were all students of the, ALL THAT IS. :slight_smile:

I started discussing in philosophy forums long ago and then I was a theist [pantheism] and a homophobic, with a lack knowledge in logic and no attention for rigor [intellectually and philosophically].

I was not influenced by any particular person but in the beginning was continuously bombarded with rational truths and the need for rigor from many highly “rated” posters in every philosophical forum I participated.

Truths and rationality will always prevail, since long ago I have leaned toward non-theism, understood homosexuality within a continuum of sexuality, strives for rationality/wisdom and to dig deeply into every topic I am interested in.

James S. Saint definitely changed my life a lot. Starting with his maxim “Clarify, Verify, Instill, and Reinforce the Perception of Hopes and Threats unto Anentropic Harmony”, he gave me a lot of advices concerning my life. Not at last he proposed an “anentropic diet” to me, which solved a lot of my health problems. And although having a full time job, I spent four years almost every night with translating his Philosophy.
Well, the outcome is here.

As I’m working on the English version of the book now, he still has a lot of influence on me, and I don’t think that will ever change. I’ll always be grateful to him.

Yeah that happened a couple of three times.
Almost all of the three real Nietzscheans that have been on this place have changed my life for the better.

This is noble.

Yes, in the long run. But sometimes life seems to throw a rough curve ball just to see how you deal with the false and irrational. Maybe it’s like a flat tire reminding you the ride is not always as smooth as you’d like regardless how truthful and rational you’ve deemed your driving skills to be. It can make for a WTF? moment.

Of all things Nietzschean, which one flipped a switch for you?

Had not heard of J.S.S. Will have to look through the archives.

Yes, the question of God’s “actual” existence started me on a journey of questioning and wondering about just that!! Thank you, ILP. We tend to hold onto old “garments” too long when they are no longer necessary even when thought to be or felt to be desired. At some point, I left that belief behind and now stand in the agnostic river. lol

Did it change my life, Yes. It put me out on that shaky limb, wading through strong currents, forced the child within to somewhat grow up and leave behind the “Daddy”. I became more of a questioner and a doubter albeit I was already one to some small degree. I have come to really “downgrade” the experience of wanting to believe something simply because many others do or because there is no easy answer or ultimately no answer as of yet.

Carl Jung’s below statement rings very true to me:

“The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don’t need to believe it.”

I also love this quote by Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

So much beauty and wisdom within those words.

When Michio Kaku said that THE FASTER YOU GO THROUGH SPACE, THE SLOWER YOU GO THROUGH TIME, that shocked Me, rattled Me to My core, excited Me, and made Me jump with glee and joy.

The idea that We bend the dimensions, tame the electrical circuitry of universal archives, Will the world, and tap into the deepest sense of psychic knowing, that feeling, that conviction spiritually overhauls Me to the next level of rumination and mystery.

well frankly there isn’t much else left to do. philosophy hasn’t solved a single problem since its inception… this is largely due to the fact that what it identifies as a problem is usually not a conceptual or actual problem, but a linguistic problem. or, it does identify a problem, existential in nature, but insists that it can be resolved (when it can’t), and continues fiddling with it for centuries, to no avail. for me, nihilism and egoism (of the stirnerite variety) is the official end of general philosophy… i mean the absolute limits it reaches. anything else is a repetition of generically similar language games played over the same subjects (which have been going on for millennia). this is why i insist that the task now is to examine particular philosophies… which are just collections of various linguistic confusions… and deduce which ideological super-structure they fall under the commission of. this is when it gets interesting, because you can almost plot the course of philosophical history and find in a series of stages, how new confusions arise out of old ones, and what specific forces are responsible for the succession. take conservatism and the types of narratives upon which it is based. this is not accidental or arbitrary nonsense, but carefully orchestrated and designed systems of very consistent, sophisticated bullshit which parades as a substantial body or doctrine of knowledge.

but in itself and as of yet, there’s no problem with conservatism as a system of values. the error occurs when these values are posited and authorized as legitimate science by those who believe in it. they mistake their sentiments, prejudices, preferences and opinions as a collection of inductive facts which are self-evident. since they are neither scientific or self-evident, there must be something else constituting the preservation of such ideological nonsense. you can then deduce that a great effort is being made through the ages to propagate these ideas, and for very specific purposes. when marx called the history of man a ‘class struggle’, he wasn’t merely referring to economic divisions between people that generate conflicts, but also to an ongoing war of ideas. since the industrial revolution, a certain collection of philosophical ideas have been purposely sustained in the public discourse for the sole purpose of preventing the dissolution of the ruling ideology that has been in control (conservatism). in its most essential and fundamental form, conservatism is an extraordinarily complex way of giving license to one of the most singular, vulgar and base features of animal nature; crude hedonistic materialism. hundreds of years of pseudo-scientific nonsense put together all for the purpose of creating an excuse not to work. that’s all it ever was. it’s mind boggling how such a simple premise could be concealed behind such a fortress of theoretical nonsense.

so you see the interesting thing for me is how ‘ideologies’ take root, become immune to, and survive even the most obvious criticism. it cannot be a mistake that so many people endorse narratives like this. it cannot be by accident that entire generations all believe the same shit. marx was absolutely correct when he suggested indirectly that ‘philosophy’ is nothing more than weaponized language and ideas for the interests of a particular class. there is no real pursuit of ‘truth’ going on here, but only a sublimation of that lowest of profanities of human nature. in conservatism, man becomes an ape once again who’s goal it is to make all the other monkeys do the work. there is no more substance to the doctrine than that. every other aspect, every single philosophical argument and point of view, can be almost effortlessly critiqued. and why is that? because it’s so easily done with nonsense.

indeed, and that’s one of the greatest obstacles of philosophy. i share with spinoza the premise that most ideas are muddled and confused… which amounts to producing in the intellect a false notion or idea of the world as a result of having only partial knowledge of the body and the causes which produce the effects in the body that are mistaken for producing objective/rational knowledge of the world. in other words, we experience our own constitution sooner than we experience things in the world. so, for example, when we experience fear or anger ‘at’ something, the cause of that feeling is just as much a condition of our own constitution as it is an indication of a specific property of that thing we attribute to being the cause. i.e., not that the thing is really fearsome… but that you are a coward… not that the thing is beautiful… but that you are wanting… not that the thing is offensive… but that you are sensitive, etc., etc.

emotional intellect, which spinoza puts as the more forcible of the types, is what rules most men. and philosophy is so often this confused and muddled kind of knowledge raised, unwittingly, to the level of rational knowledge (which it is not). what follows is not true philosophy, but the concealed expression of one’s own ineptitude. call it an enormous ‘projection’ of one’s own insipidity and relative sickness/weakness to the brute meaningless and dissatisfaction of/with the world.

the true philosopher, which is the nihilist, understands this, and so no longer bothers himself with it. there are only a small number of self evident truths which hold the status of rational knowledge. a limited set of deductive truths and the rules of logic. all else is muddled and confused emotional knowledge, more or less.

and this is precisely why philosophy persists; we aren’t satisfied with truth being simple. we insist on making it complicated (so that we have something to do), and will even invent false problems in order to keep us occupied in our own emotional catharsis. the last thing most people will accept is that nothing matters. the shock value of that fact alone is enough to drive one into philosophy. one wants to make absolutely sure that there is no other option before settling with it (becoming a nihilist)… and some even continue pretending there is another option after they’ve realized it.

the only other option is to avoid philosophy altogether, which is the safer way to go since it leads directly to nihilism once you’ve cleared it of all the bullshit. in many ways i admire the simple life of the satisfied pig, but i’d still not want to be anything else than a dissatisfied socrates. id rather know the troof than be happy. only the englishman and capitalist strive for happiness.

Just the phenomenal surprise of reading an actually brave and honourable man.

Plenty of such men who don’t write, but among writers Id never encountered one. Not if you don’t count Homer and Ovid, who are much freer. N has to stick to literal reality.

There is no one thing in Nietzsche that stands out - but if there had to be one it is his sense of humour in Zarathustra. I probably never laughed as hard as when he describes the people on the marketplace. I have to admit that it is only funny in German.

I think this is a bit of a problem with N. He is hilarious, which is one of his main assets, but translators don’t seem to have realized this. So translations are usually rather… autistic. Which leaves the reader with general concepts.

I mean it is still very good. But the humour doesn’t come across very well. German humour is… peculiar. Schleichlhaft.

Whatever, I abide with this reservation re Philosophy;