Anything at all is a correspondence with reality. There's no way to measure such correspondence because any instrument wherewith done would itself be engaged in that same correspondence. Perhaps you meant "the measure of conscious correspondence with reality". But how does one differentiate between conscious and unconscious correspondences with reality? There is only one reality and every finite thing corresponds with it in the exact same way.Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Truth is the measure of correspondence with reality.
BORING! If David wants to spread this bullshit we have a pandemic of boredom-induced mass-suicide on our hands! And the way he talks about it his "desire" must be about as important to him as my desire to fap-watch a GOT sequel based on reanimated zombie dragongirl is to me. Actually that comparison doesn't work because the latter desire is in fact very important, but you get the point.David Quinn wrote:The sage's desire to spread truth outwardly in the world ultimately derives from his life-long desire to become enlightened in his own mind.
Anyway, if desiring "truth" for oneself leads to desiring it for others, then truth is a very trivial thing indeed! People don't go around distributing things they value dearly. They only want to spread silly and trivial things like internet memes or watching a TV show. If the desire for truth is both important and the cause of the desire to spread it, there must be something very special about it. I've no doubt David will explain what that is if somebody asks him, but like everything he writes that explanation will be BORING!
So by way of prolepsis, the truth is special because it means whatever you want but also means you're correct. It is a name for getting what one wants or, at least, feeling good about oneself. In other words, truth is the root of all evil. It's not for nothing the loudest and shallowest champions of "truth", almost without exception, claim that evil is stupidity and error.
All notions of "truth" are designed to connect our awareness of things around us to a fake desire to be aware of things in general. And, of course, that "desire" always excludes those things the creator(s) of a particular definition of "truth" want to ignore, distort or destroy. But the real never is not, so even in ignoring it people have to give it a name like "untruth" or "falsity".
I'm not by any means implying that truth has no place for real things. All things are real, so a "truth" that means nothing at all isn't very useful, and hence not evil. Evil people (=all of them, including me) value real things and their awareness of them to the extent doing so serves their evil ends.
Evil! Also, BORING! This is just a collection of vague words and phrases the QRS trio have repeated ad nauseum for decades. Stupid and weak-willed people may take pleasure in reciting them. Bold and imaginative people may interpret them to mean anything they want. Wise people like have no time for them.David Quinn wrote:In other words, the tremendous passion needed to overcome one's deepest illusions, and the sheer unstoppable momentum that this generates, continues to exist unabated after one's breakthrough into enlightenment. One naturally wants to continue piercing through illusions wherever they may be found.
Our deepest illusions are inseparable from our ability to feel passionate and inspired. If you feel passionate about destroying a deep-seated illusion you're almost certainly making an even deeper one stronger in the process. If you want to destroy illusions precisely because they are illusions and for no other reason, you won't feel any passion. On the contrary you will feel sad and scared.
And what "unstoppable momentum" does overcoming illusions generate? David seems to think willingness to destroy a few "deep illusions" eventually applies to all the rest via some sort of magical osmosis. Not only is there no evidence of such osmosis, the "deepness" of an illusion is moot because many types of illusions can represent an individual's deepest fears and ambitions. The actual contents of illusions have little to do with how deeply they affect people.
Some illusions - however "deep" - are far easier to cast off than others. The illusion of death is probably the easiest one to "destroy", yet it is eo ipso also the deepest. In reality it's little more than a subject for after-dinner idle talk. If you have no reason to suspect you'll die after a definite period of time from causes known to you at present, you won't be afraid of dying and hence have no problem ridding yourself of crazy beliefs about the distinction between life and death.
Our deepest illusions are about little ordinary things like jobs or penis cancer, not big abstract things like religion or death. Thus the task of destroying *all* illusions has to be repetitive, painful and unceasing. It can offer no passion and certainly no "breakthrough into enlightenment". Moreover, it has to tackle each illusion on its own terms. It will achieve nothing if it relies upon "logical" or "absolute" truths as panaceae for curing oneself of illusions. Speaking of which...
Absolute truths are far more evil and dangerous than regular ones because they act like force multipliers against things one wishes to ignore. A single thing, like the notion of cause and effect, is made to appear bigger than everything else. All problems and paradoxes seem to vanish into thin air before them, and they emanate an aura of strength and constancy. But they're just elegant ways of expressing rather obvious facts.David Quinn wrote:A truth is "absolutely true" when it is utterly beyond all possibility of being refuted by either logic or empirical evidence. In other words, when it is necessarily true in all possible worlds.
There is nothing wrong or evil about elegant expressions of obvious facts per se. Feeling happy due to one's ability to formulate such elegant expressions, or one's awareness of books containing them, or one's acquaintance with other people who like them - that is evil. Thinking that such expressions are the highest form of wisdom, i.e. of being honest with oneself - that is wrong.
"Absolute truth" is a convenient way of treating all of the dishonesty and self-conceit permeating every facet of human life as one big abstract category of falseness, so that our own, actual falseness becomes small and anodyne amongst a heap of hypothetical falseness. What Nietzsche and Kierkegaard said about Christendom applies to all philosophies founded upon the curation of absolute truths - they are sublimated forms of Epicureanism. By transforming delusions into easily identifiable and navigable pathways of "bad ideas", they attempt to bridge the abyss between petty-bourgeois prudentia and the Agnus Dei upon the altar of Sin. They simulate the ecstasies of righteous suffering and existential trauma for people who haven't endured any real suffering in their lives, and never want to either. When real suffering engulfs such people their precious "absolute truths" are as useful to them as an umbrella in a thunderstorm.
As Hakuin noted, Zen practice amidst the chaos of worldly activity is incomparably superior to that hidden away in tranquil isolation. What he meant by "tranquility" is a self-imposed vacuum where all the obstacles to wisdom can be dismantled by incessantly repeating "absolute truths" divorced from any context applicable to the real world. David hasn't addressed even a single one of the problems regarding the very notion of "truth" that I pointed out in Part I of this essay series (or whatever it is I'm doing). He can't, because he hasn't thought about them at any depth. Wisdom to him is his capacity to encapsulate various phenomena into expressions of a vocabulary he learned from Kevin Solway (and which Kevin himself compiled out of various texts he *was* once wise enough to recognise wisdom within.) Anything opposed to wisdom, as far as David is concerned, boils down to people's inability to understand phenomena in terms of that same vocabulary.
At this point I should note (in earnest) that in no way is my current project - as it were - intended to be an assault upon QRS philosophy in particular. The good things that QRS have said and done must be acknowledged. In my opinion the high point of David's career was probably around the pre-recession era, when he still thought of himself as a colleague to the other two, and engaged in the spreading of "truth" within a lively philosophy forum. His two debates with Buddhists and IQ nerds, as well as his blog, are definitely worth reading. Yes, I am damning with faint praise here. No, I will not stop until I'm done damning.
QRS philosophy is, when all is said and done, a Roman Athena. It is a performance of wisdom as it might have existed in the great sages of old, to whom it pays homage. The same can be said of many "wise" writings and sages of the past, including some that appear in the QRS canon. Indeed this observation more or less applies to the entire domain of philosophy. I myself am in the debt of QRS (especially Kevin) and their online literature for my own development. However, I don't want to be an actor and neither should anybody else. Wisdom cannot exonerate foolishness, and if the two cohabit then wisdom is to blame and both must die. Thus, QRS delenda est.
The difference between real and fake wisdom is easy enough to identify - if a person isn't being honest about something, then any "wisdom" he claims to possess is a fabrication meant to conceal his own (and possibly others') dishonesty. True wisdom, then, is no more than a consistent belief in the value of honesty. I must stress that it is a belief and not the logical conclusion of reasoning about "absolute truths". Reason cannot tell us why we should use reason. Nor can our usage of reason in one instance carry over to others irregardless of our willingness to use reason.
A belief in absolute honesty would require we recognise how deeply interconnected honesty and dishonesty - truth and untruth, reason and unreason - are in human life, and also why this interconnectedness means that truth, reason etc. are just as bad as their supposed opposites. Here we must be ruthless and unyielding because this subject is the key to developing a real philosophy of wisdom. Such a philosophy will abandon any pretenses about standards or thresholds of honesty. At the same time it cannot position itself apart from what is already there, like an epiphany or miracle.
That is probably a good place to end this essay/rant/whatever this has turned into. I realise that some of the above might come across as bloodthirsty Taliban dogma applied to epistemology. If that's what a call to absolute honesty stripped of rationalist twaddle sounds like, I'm fine with it. If my efforts to dismantle the Moloch of truth end up the same jumbled mess of motivations, biases, emotions and actual consciousness that is truth itself, well at least I've tried. Anyway, next time (if there is one) I'll probably dive into that mess itself and then attempt to escape from it.