Get Email Updates • Email this Topic • Print this Page
I must disagree and insist that philosophy is indeed creative. How is Beyond Good and Evil or Being and Time not creative?
Also the piecemeal invention of philosophical terminology....
Art-criticism is itself an art. Even your assertion that philosophy is not creative is itself a piece of creative writing.
With respect,
S
Reconstructo;106456 wrote:You say that no person should act without knowing the consequences of their action. I say that no man knows with certainty the consequences of his action.
So no one should be certain in their action...Some one told Socrates to arrest some one, so he went home; and that at least means that he took his own advice to heart...
Quote:Life demands decisions. A parent deciding whether a child should undergo a dangerous operation is not in a position to do no harm. Life is dangerous. I strongly doubt that reality is completely knowable, predictable, etc.
Perhaps, but humanity by choice decides in a panic because we refuse to admit mistakes, because we let our ideas think for us, and because our forms, like government, fail us...We do not capture the future in our mind so we are made its prisoner...The Greeks thought that because we were created by Promeathius, we had the gift of foresight; and believed we blind ourselves with hope against hope... It is intelligence which gives sight, and those who refuse to use their intelligence because it would insure an immediate pain deserve the pain they so frantically must avoid at the end of bad decisions... You should do as you know...I have done a thousand jobs poorly out of ignorance, and learned from the process, but I could have do one good job a thousand times for a fair price if I had put thought before action...You look at our government... It is run like a blind rat in a maze from dead end to dead end not able to think more than ten seconds ahead...The Iroquois in their government were told to consider the effect of their actions on the next seven generations... The difference is the form of their government, which was democratic as ours is not, so it availed itself of many minds, and every good idea... Our government was created after the model of the Roman Republic at the point of failure, and it has failed...The more distant the government becomes from the intelligence of the people the more it must depend upon the glazed over ideas of a bygone age...Why did the founding fathers pump up our society with English law when English law would have hanged them???... New forms are inflated with the gas of the old until they stink just as bad... Democracies have existed since before time...They worked because no head was as smart as the common mind, and if we do not have democracy today it is because a few people know that their wealth and power would be impossible to justify in a democracy... They need the laws of the past which protected the theives of another age to defend the theivery of this age...
Quote:
To do no harm is not an option. We eat other life forms, live on territory that others species could feed and breed upon. Our taxes go to the making and dropping of bombs. Our blood is the breeding ground of diseases that threaten our species in general.
Your post was a piece of creative writing, and so it this one.
Regards
You say that no person should act without knowing the consequences of their action. I say that no man knows with certainty the consequences of his action.
But, Sir, you are reading into my post.
Also I don't think it's a given that a person should know the consequences of their actions. Sometimes people get lucky. Scientific discoveries are sometimes accidents. Beloved children are sometimes accidents. And the existence of courage seems related to unknown consequences. David and Goliath.
Also please consider what that statement was in response to.
Now, this society, thinking it works with a natural law, the law of natural selection, misses the finer points of our existence... We exist because we are naturally social... We are not so much selected as individuals to live, but as as groups to survive....When individuals are forced to make life choices as individuals, to stand alone against the world they are doomed...Only when people recombine as in corporations, or in churches which are incoporated, do they stand a chance, and from that form of society they are given their survival...All people have to use their heads to survive because survival in a society like ours in not assured.... We cannot communicate with our government, and can barely communicate with each other... We are urged to strike out as individuals, and then find ourselves toe to toe with corporations in some form...We cannot trust what we are told, nor are we capable of natural behavior... We should take a lesson from our underclass, and tribalize...They know that to survive in a denegrating, and demeaning society that they must do so on some natural basis... A street gang is not exactly a natural relationship, but if the relationship is with others like ones self it is natural... If you look around and see government and law and church and people all arranged against you, then you have to form up too...Or be very careful in what you do, which requires thought, and lots of it...It is very intelligent to make common cause with others, so why do our brightest stars tell us to act as individuals??? No one; not one of our voices for individualism have our best interests at heart... We need only look at how much group capital has been turned into private property in the course of our history because each such act represents an inalienable right being made alienable... And sold...None of us can look at government property and say mine, except for those who buy it from the government for a pittance...Where does it work for us???Where is the benefit in having government defend our inalienable rights only until it can get the best price??? In fact, if we would protect our rights we must protect our property because public property must support the population, and if it is all in private hands then our inalianable rights must be sold for a pot of porrage....
But, Sir, you are reading into my post.
Also I don't think it's a given that a person should know the consequences of their actions. Sometimes people get lucky. Scientific discoveries are sometimes accidents. Beloved children are sometimes accidents. And the existence of courage seems related to unknown consequences. David and Goliath.
Also please consider what that statement was in response to.
I agree. One shouldn't count on being lucky. But how many us are born "accidentally?"
Remember in Hamlet, when returns from his sea-voyage: "Rashness be praised" he says or something like that. For rashness had just saved his life. Also things like hunches. Jung has persuaded to see the psyche as something must larger than consciousness. Freud's free association is useful to the degree that association is not free. There are more things in heaven and earth, Your Excellency KennethAmy, than our philosophy hath dreamt of.
Did I misquote Shakespeare? Perhaps, perhaps....
To quote Blake: "Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?"
All that is dreamed does exist, for consciousness is the root reality. But I know what you intended. I reply: some dreams are private, others public. The public dream we call reality.
Where do we get our wisdom in neuroscience? Why is it always the implications that are spoken of? Why are we limited to such causality??? Or is that just where wisdom can be collected from this science? It just seems so pointless limited to such a context, it's as if science is the bread on the plate and philosophy is the crumbs left over.
I don't know... any thoughts?
Where do you think philosophy is headed?
Do you think there needs to be regained some feeling of mystery?
Why believe in heroes when you can make yourself a hero in fact... To think freely regardless of the consequences that such people are damned to hell is heroic... Dare to see clearly the condition of humanity which is hopless far beyond despair...Look at your fellow human beings and suffer with them their pain... Such strength is hard to come by as only the virtuous possess it; but such people, even if they lie as dirt in their graves are worth eternal life...
Personally, I have shown such bravery and strength as many a hero... Does it matter that my job demanded it of me??? Individual greatness is the sort of thing that lures the truly noble to their deaths... Don't let heroics blind you... Be only as brave as life demands...
I don't have to accept God/reality whole... I try to not conceive of infinites...We can have finite knowledge, so of finites I want to know... What others call philosophy I call morality, and morality is all infinites... So what can we know, feeling our way around in the dark???...I'd like to say I know this about that...It is all vanity... I know next to nothing about everything... If people were only so simple as a transmission, or a carburator... People can be fixed, but it takes a lot of tools....I wish I could read for fun...I open every book hoping to find some secret knowledge that will really make a difference...It is amazing what I do learn just by being open to it... But fiction no longer talks to me...