Diebert wrote:That's still the big mystery of course. Why bother with a forum dedicated to developing or exchanging thoughts on a topic you are so opposed against, its members you ridicule as incapable and the overall direction as poisonous? You throw yourself up as someone who desires to "change" that direction, some saviour complex perhaps but after years no sign of progress. And yet you insist! In the end I don't think you realize at all what you are exactly opposing. Actually I think you're not opposing anything at all. All the words are there to hide the fact that you've nothing. Nothing attacking a philosophy based on emptiness. That's ironic. But what is left of course is some emotional relief, some ability to project ones own issues everywhere you wish. And who can really stop you doing that? All one can do is to reflect carefully emptiness back and see what happens.
A few preliminary comments. It is interesting to note Russell 'reply' through a group of time-tested, almost canned, responses. The glory of the System is that it is invincible. With it one can 'take on all comers'. It can appear to hold its own against every faction within ideation: the scientific platform (biological materialism); against any branch of formal philosophy; against any platform founded on reason or ratiocination; against any religion or metaphysical view; in brief against 'the whole world'. I just think this is such a notable and interesting feature insofar as it provides, in our age and against so much that is confusing and in turmoil, the Perfect Refuge for a certain kind of mind.
You ask me this Question not because you really desire me to answer - you do not care about my answer nor any answer nor in fact any discourse - but because the only recourse you have, since you have no intention of reasoning things through, is to seek a way to discredit by reducing my interest or concern to a psychological problem. And if you succeed in that you will have an angle that you can work, and as I have said a way to divert the topic into unending dead-ends and diversions. I have come to understand that this is connected, rather obviously, to a general defense mechanism: a group of 'talking points' that have been preestablished. Well, no need to go into that, it has all been done before.
To propose an Absolute Truth, and to send up an Absolute Program, and to make Absolute Declarations, and to knock down other people and other approaches (say those of a specific religious arrangement) and other philosophical approaches and even the entire Conversation, but then to complain when someone rises to the task and takes this assault seriously, is just whining. Whatever it is that you are into (which you now describe as nothing at all), is not an inactive platform, and as I have said many times it connects to a general nihilism. It is produced by this general nihilism in my opinion, or in any case it has strong links to it. (This is the causal argument). Everything that I do and have done, I suppose I'd have to say, has been because I am interested and take seriously the quest for truth (insofar as this is possible as we are ensconsed in the mutable). Is that not enough of a reason?
When you say 'You don't know what you are opposing' you make an interesting statement. Yes, it is very true, that when it comes to nihilism and its various forms and presentations, one really cannot know what one is dealing with. One does not really understand it. Perhaps it cannot be understood? Afterall, what is it? So, what I say is that: When one notices and understands that this vaguely-shared 'philosophy of nothing' is a form of nihilism, and that we have all been infected by nihilism, and that we are called to make some response to nihilism and to seek a cure for it (that is a mere turn of phrase, a convention, and yet it contains some truth), one then discovers very good reasons to arm oneself for a sort of counter-attack. I am rather obviously quite taken with and interested in the counter-attack and I mean this much more in relation to 'the real world'.
The question you ask is the question I answer though in fact you despise the answer (and you don't want an answer, you only wish that your label could stick): We have to discover inside of ourselves the living link to our civilization. And a good part of this is certainly 'religious' (I prefer to say metaphysical), and so we
HAVE to understand how it has happened that we have been attacked and eaten apart and why our civilization is crumbling. I assert it is because there have been attacks on the very Self. Thus, the first order of reconstruction is of the Self.
So (I am still answering your question; you know, the one that you want to hear no answer!) the Genius Form has for me been an invitation with fate. It simply had to happen. In the great causal scheme of things it had been ordained since before even Time itself began that 'I' would have this encounter with the 'you' that is no you at all - a no-you. All jokes aside, I do see this as an aspect of Fate. As I have said, and as I mean, I am very thankful for this forum and for the opportunity to see exactly what it is we must
NOT do; what we must
NOT be seduced into.
I'd also suggest that you cannot (nor can I) really know definitively just who has and who has not been 'influenced' by any of this that goes on here. All that we can say with certainty is that Ideas Have Consequences. That idea alone, cast onto an ocean of folks who, like you, have no idea at all, or no-idea, and who are destroying tangible links with Idea, or in whom Idea comes to a rest and a halt: just to say 'ideas have consequences' is to remind them (in my own view) of something about their volitional self. Maybe the real end of a nihilistic no-philosophy is in its essence to inculcate no-volition? A surrender to nihilism as a strategy to defend oneself against it?
All one can do is to reflect carefully emptiness back and see what happens.
It ain't over till the Fat Lady sings. (We cannot really say where everything is tending).