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And I appreciate the well wishes and concern, everyone. It helps a lot.Prurient Squid posted:Someone in Bar Ran Dun's thread on the Socialist Decision said that Bar Ran Dun needs to define what a religion is before he describes certain political trends as being religious. I'm COMPLETELY fine with him not definining his terms. Everything is algebraic, everything is filled out in the course of experience. Let's plunge in and see where we end up. I can sympathize with wanting to define religion. The problem is generally this has been used to hurt non-Western forms of spirituality because they didn't align with our expectations of what a religion should be. Terms and definitions, well, by definition lead to exclusion so it's kind of a hard line to walk. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Sep 17, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2022 21:05
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I think that religious thought and discourse in your culture and society impact how you look at the world in a deep-rooted way, even when you make deliberate efforts to tack against them or to look at other attitudes. For most of the United States, outside of people who grew up in specific enclaves, I think that that perspective is going to be some blend of mainline Protestant attitudes and conservative evangelical attitudes, with the latter tending to get unconsciously prioritized due to their relentless marketing. Of course people are often reacting to this, but when you are defining yourself in opposition to something, to a certain extent you take on the character of that other thing. You strive towards antithesis rather than towards thesis. For me the clearest (and least controversial  ) example of this is how a lot of English language Buddhist material is extremely detached from the more mystic origins, or is a mixture of the deep mystical stuff and extensive worrying over core ideas like rebirth being "actually, for realsies" true.
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Sep 17, 2022 21:30
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NikkolasKing posted:Terms and definitions, well, by definition lead to exclusion so it's kind of a hard line to walk. Well and some people don’t want civic religion and culture criticized as religion, too.
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Sep 17, 2022 22:13
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I will always be sympathetic to projects of de-mysticalizing a religion's ideas, primarily because stuff like that was the path I took to realizing mysticism owns. That said it's better optics to do it with a tradition you were born into. e: Bar Ran Dun posted:Well and some people don’t want civic religion and culture criticized as religion, too. Critique (for instance) Marxism as a religious phenomenon and certain audiences blow their top. Ohtori Akio fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Sep 17, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2022 22:18
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Ohtori Akio posted:Critique (for instance) Marxism as a religious phenomenon and certain audiences blow their top. Even if one is doing it to explicitly enable them to speak their ideas to a religious audience!
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Sep 17, 2022 22:45
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I imagine the thinking there is that Marxism = good, religion = bad, therefore Marxism as religion is saying a good thing is a bad thing. (This is independent of Marxism as a philosophy or analytical lens.) Well I say "thinking" but it's probably more like the visceral reaction's structure.
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Sep 17, 2022 22:51
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Nessus posted:I think that religious thought and discourse in your culture and society impact how you look at the world in a deep-rooted way, even when you make deliberate efforts to tack against them or to look at other attitudes. For most of the United States, outside of people who grew up in specific enclaves, I think that that perspective is going to be some blend of mainline Protestant attitudes and conservative evangelical attitudes, with the latter tending to get unconsciously prioritized due to their relentless marketing. Even when they were the coolest people among nerds 10 years ago, I never got into New Atheism because it seemed to me Hitchens and his even less intelligent band of haters were as dogmatic and close-minded as any fundamentalist. In being anti-religious, they essentailly adopted a religious stance, having absolute faith in what they call Science and nothing else. The spirit of our age is what is basically a religion of anti-religion called Scientism. As someone whose always felt a romantic attachment to the past and to the ideas of community and "enchantment" embodied in it, your analysis is spot on and I have to accept how much of that is a reaction to being raised in a profoundly Protestant, profoundly capitalist, profoundly liberal country. I've felt something like this ever since i was a child, long before I could study philosophy and history and find people with similar feelings but with the knowledge to back them up, but I guess that just goes to show there is something to individuality. You can be raised in a certain culture and still somehow some way come out of it revolting against everything that culture stands for.
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Sep 17, 2022 23:24
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NikkolasKing posted:but I guess that just goes to show there is something to individuality. You can be raised in a certain culture and still somehow some way come out of it revolting against everything that culture stands for.
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Sep 18, 2022 00:36
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Keromaru5 posted:For one of my classes this semester, I just started reading Why Knowledge Matters by E.D. Hirsch, which is largely a critique of the American educational system, and in the preface he pushes back against the emphasis on individualism in favor of teaching a common knowledge base. In a way he kind of poses individualism vs. community as a false dichotomy, citing G.H. Mead as saying that "only full membership in the tribe leads to individuality." I would never begin to defend our education system. I think the entire idea of standardized testing for starters has proven to be a complete failure. But t stuff like that just goes to prove how our obsession with individualism is the biggest illusion of them all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY&t=28s But it's like freedom/security, another popular dichotomy. In our modern world. Freedom is defined as nothing more than the ability to do whatever you want without immediate physical impediment from an external authority. One of the first Kindle books I ever bought was this one, Illusions of Freedom: Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on Technology and the Human Condition. We all think because we won't be beheaded if we say something or because we have access to more information than anyone in human history that we are freer than they were. It's nonsense. It's one reason I have such a profound interest in hunter-gatherer societies. In these simple little groups we see a completely different way of viewing the world and ourselves. We are several thousand years out from teh dawn of "history" and maybe we took a wrong path somewhere, a dead-end. I don't know but if there is any virtue in having all this information at our fingertips, it's so we can look outside our little world and see different ways of doing things. HG societies for instance notably don't have anything like formal instruction or education, adults just do their thing and children learn through simply watching and imitating. From what I can remember, we might have different ideas on how to fix the world but it's always fun to learn. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Sep 18, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 00:57
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NikkolasKing posted:I would never begin to defend our education system. I think the entire idea of standardized testing for starters has proven to be a complete failure. But t stuff like that just goes to prove how our obsession with individualism is the biggest illusion of them all quote:But it's like freedom/security, another popular dichotomy. In our modern world. Freedom is defined as nothing more than the ability to do whatever you want without immediate physical impediment from an external authority. One of the first Kindle books I ever bought was this one, Illusions of Freedom: Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on Technology and the Human Condition. We all think because we won't be beheaded if we say something or because we have access to more information than anyone in human history that we are freer than they were. It's nonsense.
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Sep 18, 2022 01:36
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Ohtori Akio posted:Critique (for instance) Marxism as a religious phenomenon and certain audiences blow their top. I mean if be interested to hear this tbh.
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Sep 18, 2022 10:59
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If Marxism is a religion then is it entitled to the protections of religion? For instance if there was a witchhunt in a union to remove "trots" could they argue they were being discriminated against because of a belief system? Actually there's a parallel here with the Eastern bloc. Activists in China have certain protections if they label their socialist views as "Maoist". I have a friend who was part of a study circle in East Germany called "Read Lenin". How can the Stasi object to that?
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Sep 18, 2022 11:34
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So Courage and Being (from Tillich). I suppose if the very nature of a human being is to be courageous then a human being couldn't exist without courage. Then courage would be implicit in Being? edit: Being has to do a lot of service as a predicate. It has give substance to statements like "I'm a doctor", "God exists", "Human being". I suppose it must be robust enough to carry all this meaning. Also there might be a contradiction somewhere. I.e. something is by having a nature which is opposed to the flimsy insubstantiallity of just pure being. Maybe I should reread the section of A Hegel Dictionary on Being? edit: Tillich is by no means an easy read but much easier than Hegel. edit: In order to exist, things have to more than exist. ======== The flipside of this is that Being has to be more than itself. edit: For Hegel thoughts aren't just arbitrary constructs made up by some plonker that might just be wrong. Rather thought is the ether in which concepts evolve into themselves and transforms, unhaltiningly, into one another and back again while we engage in "pure looking". edit: Hegel considered himself to be a critical idealist, in contrast to the dogmatic idealism of Bishop Berkely. Therefor for him, his idealism is broad enough include materialism within itself. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Sep 18, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 11:48
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TOOT BOOT posted:That's kinda crazy. Most churches at least pay lip service to the idea that gay people are welcome. Less common than you'd think, even among mainstream Protestants. The United Methodists are having a slow-motion (due to the pandemic) schism over it right now. Ohtori Akio posted:e: Are Marx's ideas falsifiable and testable? If so, then you have found the bright line between religious belief and social philosophy. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Sep 18, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 12:23
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Two things pop into my head when I hear Marxism and Falsifiability. The first is Ernst Mandel's preface to my copy of Capital. I wonder if it's online? The other is an article basically taking apart the whole idea of science as falsifiable as basically being nonsense (the author had no political agenda and I think was a scientist.) I'll see if I can find either of them. edit: It might have been this article? But I just did a random google search, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-idea-that-a-scientific-theory-can-be-falsified-is-a-myth/ I found the Mandel preface as well, http://digamo.free.fr/mandelik.pdf I haven't read either of these. Or not recently anyway. edit2: My own interpretation would be that Marxism is basically a tool. To quote Trotsky "The revolutionary doctrine which teaches the proletariat to orient itself correctly in situations and to profit actively by them[.]". So an honest person could use the method of Marxism to produce a program and perspectives. The program and perspectives could be falsified in the course of events. Could the method of Marxism itself be falsified? It's hard to say. Maybe under certain circumstances it would lose its relevance. edit: To put forward a demand for an independent black nation in the southern united states on the basis that blacks constitute a national, rather than a racial minority might be an example of "program and perspectives" being falsified by experience. Marxism itself wouldn't be fundamentally invalidated. edit: Marxism isn't a crystal ball, and I would even go further and say that genuine Marxism rejects the idea that a crystal ball could exist because the future is characterised by uncertainty. "History knows all kinds of transformations". In fact, I think in a certain East Asian nation there was a puppet king installed by a foreign power who escaped the palace and became a guerilla leader. Guerilla leaders get elected into office and act like stooges. All kinds of unlikely things occur. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Sep 18, 2022 |
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Sep 18, 2022 12:49
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Josef bugman posted:I mean if be interested to hear this tbh. There are things people call Marxism that are very religious in nature and there are things which are not. Marx's writings are very tightly wound up in his time and what he thought would happen relatively soon after his time; he was essentially making falsifiable claims with some value judgments attached. Not religious. The Marxist critical approach is also not inherently religious: it's just a tool for talking about things. Marxism as in the family of social-political-ideological movements that swept across continents over the last century-and-change, Marxism as in the ideological foundation that states rest their legitimacy on, Marxism as in the civil religion of those states, Marxism as in something people meaningfully 'convert' to and adopt as their own moral foundation: these are similar enough to religion that I find it a useful comparison. It is why, for instance, I ended up no longer identifying with Marxism; my moral foundation isn't a match for it, I already have an incompatible one. I have primarily seen this point of view exposited from a Christian point of view, I think because some Christian writers are sensitive to the fact that the Marxist moral foundation is rather close to the Christian moral foundation. It's polemic (and a sermon), but I really like and agree with what MLK had to say on the topic: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/can-christian-be-communist-sermon-delivered-ebenezer-baptist-church
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Sep 19, 2022 04:12
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Prurient Squid posted:Then courage would be implicit in Being? “In spite of” is a negation. It’s the negation of non-Being which the negation of Being. It’s like and related to hope. The object of hope, what we hope for is always absent. What we hope for has always been negated.
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Sep 19, 2022 06:02
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Ohtori Akio posted:Marxism as in the family of social-political-ideological movements that swept across continents over the last century-and-change, Marxism as in the ideological foundation that states rest their legitimacy on, Marxism as in the civil religion of those states, Marxism as in something people meaningfully 'convert' to and adopt as their own moral foundation: these are similar enough to religion that I find it a useful comparison. I can see where you are coming from on this, but I would personally disagree. The definition you are using renders there no difference between "philosophy" and "religion" and I'd disagree on that. Many religions do possess an essential philosophy but I would argue also contain elements of difference from them. Usually in terms of rituals and other accoutrements. What is your moral foundation if you had to lay it out?
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Sep 19, 2022 10:34
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Marxist morality is hard to pin down because the Sermon on the Mount, the Ten Commandments and the Catergorical Imperitive together with their secular equivalents are to be rejected as fetishistic. Morality for a Marxist would have to dictate what you should and should not do and this can't be determined in advance. Trotsky in "In Defence of October" (1932) "But the unhappiness that rains on living men! Do the results of the Revolution justify the sacrifice which it has caused? A fruitless question, rhetorical through and through; as if the processes of history admitted of a balance sheet accounting! We might just as well ask, in view of the difficulties and miseries of human existence, “Does it pay to be born altogether?” To which Heine wrote: “And the fool expects an answer” ... Such melancholy reflections haven’t hindered mankind from being born and from giving birth. Even in these days of unexampled world crisis, suicides fortunately constitute an unimportant percentage. But peoples never resort to suicide. When their burdens are intolerable they seek a way out through revolution." hmmm... maybe I should read that Heine guy?
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Sep 19, 2022 11:55
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Josef bugman posted:I can see where you are coming from on this, but I would personally disagree. The definition you are using renders there no difference between "philosophy" and "religion" and I'd disagree on that. Many religions do possess an essential philosophy but I would argue also contain elements of difference from them. Usually in terms of rituals and other accoutrements. I guess you could say that from where I stand, philosophy is a stripped-down updated form of a religion. It's not a dig against a particular philosophy to say it fills that particular role in the lives of many, with fewer cool robes etc. quote:What is your moral foundation if you had to lay it out? Universal brotherhood, dignity, redemptibility of humankind.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:22
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Just felt like saying how much I like this thread. I never know whether I'm going to come into a long discussion of silly hats, or an explanation of something I had no idea about from a religion I never studied, or someone saying 'apophatic theology' and everyone nodding and being terribly wise. It's great. I love you folks.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:42
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Ohtori Akio posted:I guess you could say that from where I stand, philosophy is a stripped-down updated form of a religion. It's not a dig against a particular philosophy to say it fills that particular role in the lives of many, with fewer cool robes etc. See I'd again disagree on "updated". Philosophy has existed as long as religion has, maybe at the same time, maybe longer. It's interesting but perhaps my own definition would be that Religion draws from the hereafter and tells people about the material, whereas most philosophy starts with the material and then moves instead not into the hereafter but into the immaterial? That seems at least somewhat accurate. Ohtori Akio posted:Universal brotherhood, dignity, redemptibility of humankind. Those are fair. Though I'd argue about what "redemptibility" means till I am blue in the face.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:57
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Josef bugman posted:whereas most philosophy starts with the material and then moves instead not into the hereafter but into the immaterial? That seems at least somewhat accurate.
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Sep 19, 2022 18:02
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Hopper, I accept your love. Anyway, I've been reading the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius considering the Tillich and Hegel both seem to care a great deal what the Stoics thought. "A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all – that is myself" This sounds very much like Marcus Aurelius believed human beings to be reason and not much more. edit: “Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. …”
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Sep 19, 2022 18:03
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Keep in mind with the meditations that it's just a personal notebook of his. Not a grand treatise on Stoic thought.
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Sep 19, 2022 18:15
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Liquid Communism posted:Less common than you'd think, even among mainstream Protestants. The United Methodists are having a slow-motion (due to the pandemic) schism over it right now
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Sep 19, 2022 18:49
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Nessus posted:I mean, does it? This has not been the track path for the majority of philosophies I have heard of, although if you're going by number of adherents you might be closer. You also have the question of "when does it become material" -- is "human happiness" or "human flourishing" actually a material good? I mean usually there is some attempt to lay out how people live/ should live, and then it gets coupled with why they should live in certain ways or on the existence of things that are immaterial. By immaterial I don't mean that they don't matter, merely that they are intangible. Human flourishing is a material thing, but the definition of what "flourishing" is is intangible. That sort of thing. HopperUK posted:Just felt like saying how much I like this thread. I never know whether I'm going to come into a long discussion of silly hats, or an explanation of something I had no idea about from a religion I never studied, or someone saying 'apophatic theology' and everyone nodding and being terribly wise. It's great. I love you folks. Also thank you Hopper. This is a nice place and I'm happy to be part of it. Gaius Marius posted:Keep in mind with the meditations that it's just a personal notebook of his. Not a grand treatise on Stoic thought. It's the witterings of an autocrat. The fact that it is held up as an example of a "philosopher king" is a striking example against the concept. Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 19, 2022 19:12
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I guess if I had to try and describe the difference between philosophy and religion I'd say it is that philosophy tries to answer the burning questions through our own Power and efforts. Does God exist? Of course, my reason or a feeling or something tells me He does. I don't need a book (revelation) to prove what I can prove myself. Of course there are many problems with this, not least of all being even if one o these proofs worked, it in no ways proves the God you've theorized is the Christian one or the Islamic one or the Deist one. I can make a philosophical argument about how life is suffering but that in no way eads to the Buddhist path by necessity since Buddhism has a lot more to say than just that, things you'll only understand through the Buddha's revelations. Of course there are a zillion religions and types of religions out there. For people of ancient times who worshiped natural forces and had no books, for people now who just worship the planet itself, I'm not sure if this dichotomy works for them.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:44
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You can make an argument that Buddhism is a "philosophy" rather than a "religion" but I think the ambit of Buddhist practices and traditions are much wider than that. Perhaps you could say "it's a philosophical core to a religious movement." Things are likely made more confusing because I think with Buddhism, and a lot of non-Abrahamic religions in general, there's much less demand to "believe in one and not the other" for people who are not like, dedicated clergy.
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Sep 19, 2022 20:17
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I just had a thought. We're all trying to define religion, philosophy and secular ideology in what seems to me to be a kind of honest, fair dealing, non-partisan way independent from any kind of particular polemical agenda. But maybe that very attempt is artificial and sort of false. I don't know where I'm going with this but maybe the definitions are the ones applied by those people who are definitely pursuing a kind of agenda or attempt to persuade and have to be taken up and accepted or contested as they emerge. edit: If a person bitterly hated religion with a seething passion, then how that person defined religion and seperated it from other things would be of greater moment than someone who is entirely indifferent about religion. Prurient Squid fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 19, 2022 20:25
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I wanted to know who Wolff is because he comes up a lot. He's an interesting figure, very controversial and actually tried to base theology on mathematical certainty. He was expelled and threatened with hanging if her returned. The Hegel Dictionary identifies Wolff and Kant's contributions to philiosophical terminolgy with Verstand (the understanding) whereas the idealists finishing with Hegel can be identified with Vernunft (reason) overcoming the distinctions in the catergories their forebearers created dialectically.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:06
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Today's Existential Comics seems relevant.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:06
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Bongo Bill posted:Today's Existential Comics seems relevant. And this is why I have my pithy little formulation of 'not everyone can be Socrates." If people go around questioning everything, we can have no society, culture, civilization, anything. The very nature of being a human being living with other human beings is to not think and just accept authority and convention. It's one reason why I really like Nietzsche. Alone against most every philosopher in history he asked "why should we care about Truth?" Nobody stops to think about that, they just assume we should. But such single-mindedness seldom leads anywhere productive. And nowadays we have the problem of Evolution, we've evolve to survive, not to find truth. "That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrible and questionable character of existence."
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Sep 19, 2022 21:25
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Josef bugman posted:IThe definition you are using renders there no difference between "philosophy" and "religion" and I'd disagree on that. Philosophy deals with the structure of our beliefs. Theology deals with the content and substance. An example faith as “ultimate concern for” and Sartre’s ”final projects” are structurally identical (albeit with inverted ontologies) and function the same way. But ultimate concerns deal with truth of the content and substance of their object.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:36
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Nessus posted:You can make an argument that Buddhism is a "philosophy" rather than a "religion" but I think the ambit of Buddhist practices and traditions are much wider than that. Perhaps you could say "it's a philosophical core to a religious movement." There are Buddhists I know who will poo poo talk other Sanghas like no tomorrow. But, as a generality? Buddhists seem to be a lot more chill about switching to another school of Buddhism, than Christians are about switching to another school of Christianity. It also might be because of the minority status that Buddhism has in most western countries/North America. For instance - I practice Tibetan Buddhism, and I live in a Tibetan Buddhist-heavy area. But if I move to an area where the only sangha nearly by is, say, Jodo Shinshu? Or Insight Meditation? I just might join the IM sangha, just to be able to hear about - and question - the Dharma, despite it not being the school of Buddhism where I initially took Refuge in. I would rather do that, than not get exposed to dharma teachings at all. Some people at my old Sangha may get salty about it, but there's really nothing in the Dharma that I've found where you absolutely are forbidden from doing that.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:36
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philosophy is elucidating to show the world in a particular way, religion is a practice. one can philosophize about religion, and one can build a religion around the product of philosophizing
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Sep 19, 2022 21:37
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OK, with regards to man being just reason, this is something Seneca talks about. But I think it's more along the lines that reason is actually man's essential element. So inasmuch as man is man, take away reason and there's not anything left. Also this reason seems to be something that is divinely granted or is itself somehow divine.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:45
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NikkolasKing posted:And this is why I have my pithy little formulation of 'not everyone can be Socrates." If people go around questioning everything, we can have no society, culture, civilization, anything. The very nature of being a human being living with other human beings is to not think and just accept authority and convention. In a real sense it's an assumption of power -- you're the guy who gets to Question Authority, which suggests (from a certain perspective) that you are in a position above Authority, however constituted.
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Sep 19, 2022 21:46
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Nessus posted:I think there is a lot of lingering gloss on the idea of being a philosopher as a high-status, renowned, epochal THING you do - even if people may sneer at actual modern philosophers. It requires a certain degree of leisure and intelligence, and I think the leisure/detachment from Working for a Living is a large part of it. We had our recent character visit in the ancient history thread from the gentleman who could not conceive of a social role to which he would fit other than philosopher/landlord. I'm sorry I missed that discussion. I think having to work for a living naturally brings its own limitations, though. Another philosopher I like, Arthur Schopenhauer, was independently wealthy and sneered at the philosophy professors who worked in university because they were beholden to what was expected of a university philosophy professor. Especially in a lot of German universities at the time you could not say or do a lot of things, or you had to severely moderate your position. Even today there re definitely expectations of what you should or should not say in any position. I guess I'd just say nobody has a privileged position to everything. A capital P Philosopher probably knows a lot of things a Proletariat does not but also vice versa. People in here were talking about Marxism earlier, I never liked Marxism's focus on Class and Class division, especially as it's taken by some as very exclusionary, when it's abundantly clear from the history of Marxism itself that people of all classes can recognize and fight injustice.
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Sep 19, 2022 23:36
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I am not a card-carrying Marxist but I believe part of Marx's argument was that this was a description of the social forces, which are a sort of standing pressure front that nudges people in a particular direction. Individual workers could have false consciousness and such, and individual capitalists and so forth would take actions which would matter in a certain way, but the overall pressure of capital was to do X and Y. (Which was not intrinsically bad; capitalism was an important stage in the progress towards socialism/communism.) The thing to me is, I think Marx had a pretty good analysis of the pressures of capitalism, and perhaps implicitly some good ideas of the socio-economic pressures of large-scale human societies in general. This kind of got enshrined rather than used as a toolkit in a lot of cases.
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Sep 19, 2022 23:51
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