in search of wisdom

striking passages on my journey to truth

[insearchofwisdom]

In those recollections Rhees also recalls that Wittgenstein worried, in a manner typical of his severe self-criticism, that he was a "monster.” This criticism echoes a discussion about the authenticity of the philosopher in Plato’s “Phaedrus.” Socrates admits he has failed to obey the Delphic injunction to know his own self and declares it 'absurd to consider problems about other beings while I am still in ignorance about my own nature.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/opinion/wittgensteins-confession-philosophy.html

[insearchofwisdom]

You have said that it is in the name of human dignity that man refuses to treat man as an object. That is false. It is for a philosophical and logical reason: if you postulate a universe composed of objects, truth is eliminated. The world of the object is the world of the probable. You owe it to yourself to acknowledge that any theory, whether scientific of philosophic, is probable. The proof of that lies in the fact that scientific and historic theses differ and always appear in the form of hypotheses. If we acknowledge that the world of the object - the world of the probable - is unique, we will end up with nothing but a world of probabilities, and therefore, since a probability depends on a certain number of accepted truths, what is the basis of your certitude? Our subjectivism permits certitidues such that we can agree with you on the level of the probable, and justify the dogmatism that you have demonstrated during your presentation, but that does not make sense in view of the position that you are taking.

Jean-Paul Sartre during discussion after his presentation of "Existentialism is a Humanism"

[swallowtheredpill]

Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.

Spinoza (via swallowtheredpill)

[insearchofwisdom]

Walker, Errant.

Check out my new hiking blog! It will catalog my new hobby and progression from terrible to hopefully not-so-terrible photographer.

[insearchofwisdom]

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship”

[insearchofwisdom]

It ain’t them things you don’t know what gets you into trouble, it’s them things you know for sure what ain’t so.

Charles F. Kettering

[sartreanreflections]

…one can then represent Spinoza as in effect saying that the extended world is to be conceived as a closed mechanical system, or as a system in which the total amount of energy is constant; and, secondly, he is in effect saying that all the changing qualities and configurations of extended bodies can be adequately represented solely as transmissions or exchanges of energy within this single mechanical system. Spinoza’s denial that an act of creation by a transcendent creator is logically possible could be translated as a denial of the possibility of energy entering into the system from the outside; the physical world must be conceived as complete in itself, self-generating and self-maintaining. Commentators have generally remarked that Spinoza, in making motion-and-rest the fundamental concept to be used in describing the spatial or physical world, in fact anticipated more closely than Descartes the future structure of mathematical physics; he seems to have envisaged physical explanation as being necessarily dynamical in form, with physical things represented as ultimately no more than configurations of force and energy. But it must be remembered that such interpretations, although incidentally illuminating, are not to be taken as direct and literal translations; for concepts such as force and energy, as they occur in modern physical theories, are not metaphysical concepts; they can ultimately be interpreted, however indirectly, in terms of equations verified by actual experiments and observations. Spinoza is deducing the necessity of motion-and-rest as a primary characteristic of the extended world without any reference to convenience in summarizing actual experimental results; he is appealing only to the strictly logical implications of his prior notions of a self-creating substance conceived as a an extended thing (res extensa). But the deductive system which is his metaphysics is so much the more worth studying if, following its own logic, it results in a programme of scientific explanation in outline accords with the actual methods of later science. This is certainly one of the tests of the adequacy of a metaphysical system.

-Spinoza, by Stuart Hampshire p. 71-2 (via sartreanreflections)

[intrinsic-curiosity-deactivated]

[insearchofwisdom]

[Spinoza] considered almost everything which had been written and said about God, and about his creation of the Universe, as meaningless, unphilosophical men being incapable of conceiving God clearly; for they are by training incapable of understanding what they cannot imagine. Any image or mental picture must be a projection of our own sense-experience; we can only form a picture from elements of our experience. But God, essentially and by his nature, is wholly outside our experience, and cannot be properly described by imaginative analogy with anything within our experience; he must be conceived by an effort of pure thought. Similarly, all the other terms which we use in our philosophical thinking, that is, in our attempt to understand the Universe as a whole, must be carefully examined to ensure that they really do represent to us clearly-defined intellectual conceptions, as opposed to confused images or pictures derived from our sense-experience.

Stuart Hampshire, in "Spinoza"

[insearchofwisdom]

If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"

[insearchofwisdom]

[insearchofwisdom]

thank you so much! i feel the most connection to david hume as a philosopher and from a young age i've always questioned existentialism. existentialism has put me in a dark place, the more i understand it. but i can't stop thriving to discover more about what i believe. i'm trying to find a link between buddhism and nihilism, as strange a concept that may sound, because buddhism's meditations and healing help and i feel that the 'sunyata' doctrine may help my nihilist perspective (continued)

See next post.

[insearchofwisdom]

a little less of a struggle to live with (excuse the irony). it must be wonderful to teach this, i don't think philosophy is endorsed enough in education. i look forward to reading your essay; i hope to develop my own beliefs through essay-writing but it's something that i leave incomplete out of frustration every time.

Interestingly, nihilism doesn’t work. When you think about it logically, the statement “the world is meaningless” strips itself of meaning, and therefore cannot be true. That is basically the conclusion Camus comes to in The Myth of Sisyphus. He says that the simple act of living is a affirmation of meaning and contradicts his initial premise - that the world is absurd. That is why existentialism is so liberating; it fills our lives with meaning and strips away the necessity and absurdity that we think we face in our every day lives. The only thing necessary about our situation is that we are IN a situation; the rest is contingent upon how we interpret that situation in relation to the fullness of our lives. Meaning and justification exists. Just because we are the foundation for that meaning and justification does not make it any less significant.

[sartreanreflections]

What a gem I have found!

[aydinoztoprak]

Ben de öyle, diyorum ona; ben de öyle. Yaşamak bulantısı bırakmıyor yakamı. Onun yüzünü görüyorum arada bir aynada. Sokaktaki her insanın yüzünde onu görüyorum. Peşimdeki hissiyatından olsa gerek hiçliğime her akşam kadeh kaldırıyorum tüm bulantılarıma rağmen. Bir insan kutlar mı hiçliğini? Ben kutluyorum. En çok da şarap içmeyi seviyorum hayaletiyle. Ben yine devrik cümleler kurmaya devam edeceğim; bulanacağım, bunalacağım. Yüzümden okunmayacak bu onun aksine. Yaşayan yerlerim ağrımaya devam edecek ta ki varoluşum nihayete erene dek. Yirminci yüzyıldan yirmi birinci yüzyıla taşıyacağım onun bulantılarını. İnsanların kulaklarına fısıldayacağım aslında ne kadar bulanıyor olduklarını. Benim adım Jean-Paul Sartre diyeceğim; kendi adımı söylemeyeceğim asla. Çünkü benim bir adım yok. Çünkü yaşamak sanrısı da yaşamak ağrısı kadar acıdır. 

[insearchofwisdom]

...no one before Descartes had stressed the connection between free will and negativity. No one had shown that freedom does not come from man as he is, as a fullness of existence among other fulnnesses in a world without lacunae, but rather from man as he is not, from man as a finite, limited being. However, this freedom can in no way be creative, since it is nothing. It has no power to produce ideas, for an idea is a reality, that is, it possesses a certain being that I cannot confer upon it. In addition, Descartes himself limited its scope, since, according to him, when being finally appears...we cannot refuse it our adherence. WE can thus see that he did not push his theory of negativity to the limit: 'Since truth consists in being and falsehood in non-being only.' Man's power of refusal lies only in his refusing the false, in short, in saying no to non-being. If we are able to withhold our assent to the works of the Evil Spirit, it is not because they are true or false -- they have at least, insofar as they are our conceptions, a minimum of being -- but insofar as they are not, that is, insofar as they relate falsely to objects that do not exist...Thus, Descartes constantly wavers between the identification of freedom with the negativity or negation of being -- which would be the freedom of indifference -- and the conception of free will as a simple negation of negation. In short, he failed to conceive negativity as productive.

Sartre, in Cartesian Freedom

[insearchofwisdom]

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future -- and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

Albert Camus, Notebooks