GENIUS FORUMS

Alex,

DQ: "When you are deeply familiar about a particular subject, you can recognize when others are also deeply familiar with it. It is one of the benefits of expertise."

AJ: But there are at least 3-4 major fractures in the wall or edifice that is a traditional and uncritical understanding of this odd character Socrates, and a critical reading, and a reading between the lines (the only worthwhile reading) points toward a different understanding of the man. And if this is so, and if this Socrates is as flawed as I assume he is, this fact sort of fractures your solidities about 'Truth'.

Socrates certainly wasn't perfect. I don't think anyone in history has ever come close to reaching perfection. So he had his flaws, for sure.

Nevertheless, a person can still come to understand the nature of Reality, even while possessing character flaws. As long as he has the desire for ultimate understanding and is willing to employ his intellect diligently, that is all that really matters.

I am most definitey arguing, with nearly complete conviction and an almost religious certainty that I am right, that there is only an idea about a Truth, there is an attraction in the human mind for a 'Truth', and that one of the great errors is to assume that one has it, or can define it, and convey it. So, while you ask me to state definitively, as a sort of public declaration, and present an Inquisitional document I must sign, if there is or is not a 'fundamental truth', I will only refer to Hesse's dream Goethe in Steppenwolf who laughed and frolicked and chided and shot pretty stars and fireworks out of the flower in his vest, and I will tell you---I will sing to you in Nietzschean rhapsody!---that the answer to your question will be gotten when you have successfully licked a beatiful girl's pussy and have rubbed its fluids all over your head...

I've heard of people being pussy-whipped before, but I've never heard a person singing the praises of being pussy-splattered. It sounds a bit pathetic to me, rather like the grateful gushings of a slave.

In any case, I take it that you are basically saying that all there is is life itself. While that is true in a sense, it doesn't deal with the fact that most people are irrational, deluded, have mental blocks, believe in things which don't really exist, etc. "Truth" is simply the experience of life enjoyed by those who have removed all these impediments from the mind.

In other words, Truth isn't just an idea. It is literally life itself, as experienced by the undeluded.

That is pretty much what HH had to do to overcome certain psychological preponderances he discovered in himself, and I assume the boys of this list are in a similar preponderant place. The pussy has all the secrets, the pussy will reveal everything to those who approach it reverentially!

That is truly sad.

There is this fellow who has written about Socrates and Nietzsche, I thought some of his ideas were worth consideration:

(John Moore)(My italics)

"In addition to perfecting his ideas, Socrates needed to influence his contemporaries by working on them psychologically. This is one explanation for the dramatic structure he built of his personality. Passionately concerned to persuade, the ideas alone were not enough. His death played an important part in promoting his views. Martyrdom is historically one of the strongest arguments of all."

The dead argue their case better than the living...

I don't think you are taking this aspect into consideration: an irritating, conniving faggy little prick who enters your psychology through a back door, gets in there and twists things all around, who literally 'fucks' with you, who one-ups you at every turn. Have you ever come across this type in real life, Herr Quinn? I have, and if there were not civil laws to protect them they'd have their teeth smashed in. To say this does not diminish the Socratic thrust, or the relevancy of this new style, and what can and did come of it. But I think you have also to look at things critically, a little ireverentially, with a subversive attitude, some transgressive flair.

I don't think you are displaying any of these traits. Socrates was infinitely more irreverent and subversive than the sort of muck you are throwing here. What you're essentially expressing is the common hedonistic viewpoint, which isn't very interesting at all.

-

David,

Truth isn't just an idea. It is literally life itself, as experienced by the undeluded.

When you open your 'eyes' do you see appearances and forms? Don't you realize these are illusions? Can you get rid of them? Experiencing purely 'the truth' is not possible.

As for this concept 'truth', it is really just an idea, that's how it evolved at least. Now you appear to be turning it into an ideal that is fundamentally unreachable (aren't all ideals?).

David,

I see this as an attempt at being iconoclastic, albeit done poorly.

Religious people tend to interpret things in a way that fits in with their convictions.

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." - Human, All too Human

Firstly, no wise man has ever spoken against the value of life - if by "life" we mean the whole of conscious existence. They might speak against certain aspects of conscious existence, just as Nietzsche is doing here, but they would have no reason to speak against conscious existence itself. So Nietzsche is really just attacking a caricature of his own making here.

Life for Nietzsche is will to power. To remain conscious and have no will to power, which wouldn't be possible, would be to be dead in this sense. So if we compare this to your ideas, dead would become your ideal (to be cognizant and passive). Depending on the grade of one's will to power one would rank on the continuum from noble (high will to power) to weakest decadent (low will to power).

This discussion over the last few days has really helped me understand Nietzsche more. I hope it doesn't seem futile to you. I plan to bookmark these to read later too.

DQ wrote:

"I don't think you are displaying any of these traits. Socrates was infinitely more irreverent and subversive than the sort of muck you are throwing here. What you're essentially expressing is the common hedonistic viewpoint, which isn't very interesting at all."

Muck? MUCK!? Well, now we have a little disagreement, a far more serious disagreement! Je suis un artiste!

;-)

I'm not sure you are getting what I mean. Zarathustra is cram packed with symbols and allusions, all sorts of grandiose similies and high-faluting lingo. You've got snakes and eagles and caves and high places, all sorts of boyscout imagery with the smell of pine sap that can only excite a boyish mind, and I know you'll have to agreee with me on this point. You seem to relate to this, and so you speak with a straight face of living mentally at the edge of a glacier (etcetera). It is of course a rather absurd allusion, but it is representative of the general air. So, I counter all that Cub Scout malarky with an image of a delicious vagina and the licking of it, as an antidote to your own poetical madness. I suppose that the meaning is that I think that these abstractions you have established as proposed goals are ideas that can be looked at and examined, and not merely taken lying down as it were.

However, I do think I was at least somewhat on the money in respect to the 'will-to-power' of the Socratic types. For example, I guess you are all disciples of Weininger to some degree or other. I have gotten the impression that he has set up some questionable categories that pertain to men and women, the masculine and the feminine, and I am assuming that you value and exalt the masculine and the masculine ideal, and that you deliberately choose the rough and difficult mountain path, there between the crags, where you walk in tremendous solitude among the peaks of attainment, far, far away from the lowly female, the slave-driver, the mass of man drunk on avidya. This is of course all couched in caricature and some ridicule on my part and with 'sound reasons': I think it is little more than an absurd game played by adolescents, and so I come along with some cures for the adolescent mind, and I couch it all in the same absurd assurance that I am Right as you do. And I can say this, and represent what I think, because this is a list devoted to truth, 'truth' and Truth. And the truth-'truth'-Truth shall set us all free...

There is another angle here too. Socrates was more of a fag then many people seem to want to admit. Now, I have my own homophobic and misogynist doctrines (a sort of misogyny lite but I'm still working on it!), I'll admit to it, but here among the manly-men I guess I have to just come out and say that in a group of different ways this Socrates was a classical homosexual mind-fucker, and in that represents not a masculine tradition of strength but an effeminization of the mind and of the spirit. I assume---indeed it is pretty clear---that he would have wanted to fuck his young boy disciples and vented a sort of rage against men of another sort, men of action in many cases. Suffice to say that there are some subterranean currents in old Soc that need to examined. And especially for those of us who feel that our dialectic is a weapon in this world of woe.

I really point this out for your own benefit as you seem to assume he and others like him, similarly engaged, represent a pinnacle of masculinity. And I don't think this is a minor point either, not at all. If one is really and truly concerned with what it really and truly means to be a man and to carry the masculine principal and to represent it in the world, I don't think it is a minor issue at all.

I think the reference to Hesse's Steppenwolf and its profound connection to Nietzschean ideas went over your head. You say 'How sad!' and you seem to really mean it. However, in that novel what that character did, what he allowed himself to go through, what he experienced and the way he did it, were in my estimation a number of light-years beyond anything I have seen represented on this list, even the best and brightest idea. And the reason? It is likely that you-all have a strange and rather pathological tactic of ruling out the feminine, of separating yourself from it like a den of zealous Eagle Scouts. (And Boy Scouts spend their evenings jerking themselves and each other off and telling spooky stories, lest you forget, and the party'd be far more interesting if you had a few Brownies and Girl-Guides to help you channel your energies).

From the vantage of art and all that pertains to 'the spirit' this pushing away of the feminine is a death-elixor! Don't drink it! I slap that cup down to the ground from your eager lips! I swear to you on the inner and outer labia of the female of our species that the juice of a pussy will do far, FAR more than any of this drivel. But that of course is an allusion, and my symbolic and alchemical language is likely beyond you.

Selah...

But I will not turn away from you my brothers! and I will not abandon you! I am here for the duration! I carry a torch and I will not deny you the glimmerings of light you need...to stumble forward on your dreary pathological paths!

AJ, your posts are very long. I can't read them any more. Artists summarize, and thus don't bore their audiences.

Could you rephrase that post in one or two sentences?

David, thanks for your assessment. It has strengthened my resolve to do what I already knew had to be done. I need to learn how to deal with the wisdom I have before I reach for more.

Until a week ago, after three weeks of business dealings with childhood friends, I had no idea what Lao Tzu meant when he said that a sage must treat all men like straw dogs. Now I worry that I treat men like straw dogs so excessively that I can no longer treat them like men.

I'm simply too inexperienced to deal with most of the things I've learned. I'll keep my posting in the Genius Realms to a minimum as I re-evaluate my life in terms of the wisdom I have gained from here. I will watch, but not speak.

If you become my disciple, I will gladly express wisdom in 2 pithy sentences.

Indeed. Wisdom cannot be spoken of in simple, short sentences. (Last post for a while. You were simply asking for this, though.)

I seem to ask for everything and always get what I deserve! For me, 'wisdom' is what I might speak on a bad day. When ee cummings wrote 'kisses are better than wisdom' I used to think he was speaking as a sensualist or a hedonist. Now I know better! Soon, I will bring my rainbow colored doctrines to the whole world! Trevor, take care and see you soon!

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Rationalists do not do that. Only a poor thinker ignores his experiences.

I quite agree!

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:You were toeing that line, yes. I think you have become considerably more cautious now.

Actually I tend very much to promote pure reasoning in instances where empiricism isn't suited to solving the problem, and you can see that I did just that in this recent post. In fact, I've been accused during the last month of being too interested in meaningless philosophizing! But when people make claims which are in the realm of science to investigate, and which really aren't in line with what science has found, I do insist that some attention be paid to the findings of empirical science.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:I don't particularly care what your beliefs are, so long as they are true.

I am afraid that many of the things I believe are probably wrong.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Since I know my beliefs are true, for the sake of my own sanity, I'll stick to understanding them.

Aha, but your beliefs really don't seem to be true - at least, not all the time. Were that the case you would more correctly have understood my position. I think that to be secure in one's own beliefs is contrary to Socrates' ideas. Indeed, Socrates' relentless tendency towards self-questioning seems, from my standpoint, to be his most laudable trait. Perhaps the beginning of wisdom is to deny that one has it; after all, a person who insists on his own wisdom will never recognize his folly in order to address it, but a fool can sometimes learn to improve.

Matt Gregory wrote:Xenophon and Aristophanes also wrote about him.

True, but Aristophanes was hardly a historian, and Xenophon's writings don't entirely agree with Plato's; for instance, Xenophon has the Oracle claiming there was none more virtuous than Socrates, rather than none wiser than Socrates. I think we know roughly as much about Socrates as we do about Jesus - namely, enough to say he probably did exist, but not enough to speak with great confidence about anything he said or did.

I was just responding to the charge that Plato invented Socrates out of thin air. He might have but it's not likely given the evidence that we have.

True, Aristophanes wasn't a historian, but doesn't need to be one to be an authority on what happened because he was there.

I don't think those two quotes about the Oracle constitute a significant difference in what was said. It was written by Plato that Socrates defined wisdom and virtue the same.

Incidentally, I don't think it makes a difference anyway if Socrates existed and that the writings we have are what he actually said. What we have is an appearance of a person that's construed to us by writings, and that appearance is what we ought to think of when we say "Socrates" because there is no other appearance of Socrates that we have access to as far as we know.

Let's say one night, unbeknownst to everyone, you were abducted by aliens and their spaceship had the power to travel back in time, so they took you back to Ancient Greece, gave you a Babel-fish and introduced you to Socrates, who turned out to be completely different from the Socrates in the philosophy books. Would it make a difference and what kind of difference would it make?

Or maybe we should question the authenticity of the stories because they depict a person whose words and actions are so impossible that he can't exist now or then?

Matt Gregory wrote:I was just responding to the charge that Plato invented Socrates out of thin air. He might have but it's not likely given the evidence that we have.

Oh - sorry if my reply wasn't very appropriate to your initial comment. I admit that the thread is so long that I only skimmed the remarks by everyone except Trevor, with whom I was having a minor disagreement.

Matt Gregory wrote:Let's say one night, unbeknownst to everyone, you were abducted by aliens and their spaceship had the power to travel back in time, so they took you back to Ancient Greece, gave you a Babel-fish and introduced you to Socrates, who turned out to be completely different from the Socrates in the philosophy books. Would it make a difference and what kind of difference would it make?

Well, it would probably make me identify less with Athenians and the Hellenic Period, and it would likely have no effect on my philosophical ideas, which were well developed long before I even knew what Socrates supposedly said and did.

But there would also be the unpredictable way in which this fact about the true nature of Socrates would influence my acceptance or rejection of ideas or facts in the future. It is often very difficult to say where any particular piece will fit into a puzzle, but given that we are left with the task of reconstructing a picture out of a fraction of the total pieces, sometimes even a single piece may turn out to be of key importance.

xerox: Pursuit of truth, reality, enlightenment are articles of faith.

Faith in their existence.


DanR: Such things would only constitute articles of faith if one believed in them for no good reason. Testing the hypothesis that they exist needn't involve faith.

A 5-10 year test of the hypothesis that sacrifices your entire being? Oh, I think there is some faith involved.

Or hope, which is a sort of uncertain faith in the future. The whole world is based on belief; so what of it?

divine focus: skipair has left the building.

He's gone to sacrifice his entire being to something he has more faith in. Next time we see him, perhaps he'll have been hoodwinked into marriage?

Xonophon, the world's first reporter (Anabasis), mentions his friendship with Socrates.

If you recall, he mentions the different reports of the Peloponnesian war, and sets out with the Ten Thousand to record events as they happen rather than rely on memory. IIRC, his mention of Socrates is as if everyone knew who he was talking about.

Course, that's on the projected Matrix I live on; yours may have different texts brought to your attention.

Is rationalism a religion?

No, not generally, although there are a few cases of it being made into one.

Should it be one?

Nope, sounds like a piss-poor idea to me.

Uni,

No, not generally, although there are a few cases of it being made into one.

It's interesting how quickly Dawkins' name came up in this thread....

Just as a side note, I don't consider him a rationalist. It's hard to believe he thinks clearly or consistently enough to merit a label -- but his attempt to consider scientific facts of the same order as religious revelation makes me agree that if he were a rationalist, he would not rest until everyone worshipped the Rationalist Deity: Richard Dawkins.

Nope, sounds like a piss-poor idea to me.

Hrmph. It's hard to argue with that.

What is rationalism?

Rationalism is using the dictionary as one's sole source of knowledge. Usually it involves forgetting that the dictionary was written by empiricists. It seems to me to be a religion that has all it's faith in the definitions of the english language (hi trevor) and it's God is often it's metaphysical deductions.

That is not, however, rationalism.

Rationalism is the philosophic tradition exemplified by thinkers as varied as Socrates, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Buddha, and Sartre. It traditionally is considered opposed to thinkers like Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Dewey, and Hume. Some people claim that there are thinkers who are neither rationalist nor empiricist. Traditionally, Kant is considered neither, and is given the label "transcendental idealist". Whether or not he actually manages to avoid falling into one of these categories is not a question that I find that interesting, since he's quite clearly an empiricist trying to describe rationalism in empiricist vocabulary, which is as pointless as it is tedious.

The simplest way to tell the difference between the two schools is what the intention of the author is. Often, rationalists focus on truth, whereas empiricists focus on utility. Both are necessary to philosophic thought, and no thinker is ever "completely" one or the other.

Trevor Salyzyn wrote:Is rationalism a religion? Should it be one?

I don't even understand the question. What do you mean by religion?

David Quinn wrote:Socrates certainly wasn't perfect. I don't think anyone in history has ever come close to reaching perfection. So he had his flaws, for sure.

This makes no sense: "I don't think anybody in history has reached perfection, therefore Socrates hasn't reached perfection and has flaws." Shouldn't that be the other way around? "Socrates had flaw X, therefore he wasn't perfect, therefore I haven't come across anyone who has reached perfection." I personally think Socrates was a good sage. He had a lot of balls to go around interviewing everybody and showing them how ignorant they are. You gotta admire that.

Trevor,

That is not, however, rationalism....

The simplest way to tell the difference between the two schools is what the intention of the author is. Often, rationalists focus on truth, whereas empiricists focus on utility. Both are necessary to philosophic thought, and no thinker is ever "completely" one or the other.

I guess I'm a rational empiricist then because I realize that you cannot get any "truth" from deductions based on the empiricists' definitions.