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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.
Ok, in a practical sense man is the opposite of acceptance. He is a force operating upon his environment. So you have the dynamic aspect of life as war and man as a soldier, negotiating a treacherous terrain. Spinoza for me is a White Lie. Concepts can function as myths do. Spinoza is conceptual art. Accept reality whole and such is a rationalization that fucntions as an antidote to excessive disgust/indignation. Ultimately I'm a selfish being, using all the tricks in the book to survive and if possible flourish, even if this flourishing is only a great feeling invisible to most. Life is largely a bluff. But a successful bluff becomes real. It gathers chips. This is where the Jesus cartoon is right. Faith moves mountains. Faith or courage or call it what you will. I would bet there is more success in worldly terms founded on courage than on intelligence. I'm not a cowardly person by any means, but my desires are not that worldly. The more aware we are of our motives, the stranger the unaware seem. Children know not what they are capable of. Cute little boy might murder his wife one day, overdose on Christmass. Hitler was a baby once. I feel such a sense of self-ownership that if I was sick of life I would end it. Maybe I will when it loses it spark. When the body becomes a burden. The Satan myth is as central to our culture as Christ almost. To deny God and all authority. You mentioned your steel working days and I related to that. Some humans are no longer alienated from there desires. What they desire is therefore right. But prudence has still its claims, as the world would punish the greatly outnumbered individual. And then once one attains self-ownership, there is still the problem of what do we want most? For we can't have it all. Many choices make others impossible. Finite man. Poor thing. I'd like to live 20 lives. No wonder vampire stories are popular. Life is too short for individual human potential.
I hope that Blake's was a rhetorical question.
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream.
Only, you can't row a boat without oars, just as you can't think about such matters without logic.
As Beowulf suggests courage can overcome fate... As I may have told you, I worked with the Iroquois working Iron... They and our other nations held courage in high regard... Yet they never went on the war path without a plan, kind of like an american express card... Those people were primitive, but very open to innovation and improvement...We took advantage of them not because we were superior beings, but infirior beings with a superior technology, much of which we adapted from people who first bloodied us...Those people still prize courage, as I do myself; but they are very often witty to a sharp edge...If more of them are in the gang it is because they do not seek authority over their own...
If you would be like Faustus and never die until you said: Enough; would anyone ever die??? Once we realize the inevitable workings of time, when we find our abilities, and judge our resources, the biological fact that we must feed, grow, flower, breed and seed, and yet, if possible, make some contribution to culture and mankind, we find this judgement of resources always comes late...
...It is because of death that some lives can be judged tragic because even at an advanced age death came too soon..Others will not be missed, and so many place holders are erased by death, so death is often just...
Those people, I presume like yourself, who can judge life as an abstraction have it all wrong... Forget the fact that death is within your power...Consider by what standards you judge your life when nothing is real without life... We can kill life fare easier than we can abstract it... If we try to abstract life, we lose its essence as the only real thing upon which all reality rests...
---------- Post added 12-13-2009 at 01:57 PM ----------
We cannot think about things in a rational, logical fashion without logic...Okay...That is one part of our lives, the physical world of sense...Most of our lives are composed in gross of moral realities...If people are not behaving rationally, what is the point of reason applied to them...What is logical then becomes what people do that results in good... And there is a logic...One man said that all change is an attempt at problem solving... What do societies do when the majority want change of some sort because they have problems they cannot solve without change, and the minority looks at all who want change as the only problem needing change...When a change of forms is clearly needed, those who need the cahnge invariably try to change others, and so waste their enemy...People cannot change, and change their forms to avoid change... A change of forms requires only a superficial change, of mind or perspective...Instead, the Romantics always try to change mankind...I want no change for mankind other than the change they have already shown themselves capable of, which is an exchange of forms...
Most of the important aspects of Western philosophy are long forgotten. Many of the modern philosophers are actually anti-philosophers. I include many of the existentialists and others in that. Wisdom has always consisted of being able to see the hidden order of things which most people can't be bothered understanding. Nothing has changed, it is still like that. But the world is becoming progressively more confused and confusing and actually quite chaotic in many ways. We seek escape from chaos in media and sensation and the pursuit of pleasure and money. This is all normal. It is the task of philosophy to criticize it.
I sympathize with your anti-materialism. Since I was a teenager I've had almost a disgust for piles of possessions. Books were always an exception, but it's obvious why. Time has struck me as the real resource. Relationships strike me as genuine wealth. Of course one's relationship with books and one's self is part of that as well. I wonder if anything has taught me as much as making it work with my wife. Floating the male/female dynamic in this wasteland is to create an oasis. Yeah, Scruton is a bit nostalgic. I wonder if backwards is a viable direction. I suspect a new religion will appear. Perhaps it has already appeared. Have you read the Impossibility of an Island? Brilliant book and author. Tackles the modern breakdown. Also quite the character.
If social change is your goal it cannot be reached going forward...People try to stop time with their forms because they fear the future...When their forms fail they need to be reminded of an ideal past that they can recapture with the ideal social form... The French, Russian, English, and American revolutions had this element, of caputring the past when the present had failed them...
The power of the old religion is found in the failure of our social forms, our economy and government... At least God does not make any promise he has to keep to the living..
What is going to happen, I think, is that scientific materialism, the dream of fundamentally understanding the nature of reality from a third-person viewpoint, will perish. This is going to be far more momentous than 'a new religion'. It is going to be a revolution rather similar to the Copernican one. But much more important, much bigger, with much larger consequences.
I must admit that the only social change I really hope for is on the private scale. I'd be lying if I said I put much energy into anything larger than that. I think about social issues. I have my tastes. But its my temperament to accept. I don't want to jump on the grenade. Also I feel too small. Not in the shameful or unhappy way, but rather in the politically significant way. So much "resistance " has been succesfully assimilated/commodified. Idealist violence doesn't appeal to me either. Protest seems ineffective. Also I am just too selfish. I don't have children. Don't plan on any. Don't expect consciousness after death. My mortality is quite real to me. And there is so much beauty on this crooked road, that this mortality offends me. I want to say Yes despite all the crap, despite the injustice and misery. For the only justification I can see for the ugliness is an appreciation of the beauty. One thing I have learned is to appreciate my wife for the miracle she is. To have a good woman who loves you is nothing to be squandered. So it seems most likely to me that I will hold this little ship together while the holding seems worthwhile, and face death with calm acceptance when it's no longer possible to avoid it or worth avoiding it.
I agree that an appeal to an ideal past is a good motivation. But we are almost a new type of human. We are the ultra-consumer. Dazzled with choices. Not only what to eat and wear, but also who to be. Even gender is becoming an option. In some ways it's a brave new world. The drugs, the plastic surgery, the 15 minutes of fame that becomes more possible. In Europe there's a negative birth rate in some social classes. We all want to be young, have fun. The death of God and tradition. All that is left is property rights and individualist hedonism. That's an overstatement but it does seem the trend. Something new may appear on the scene. Can't say.
---------- Post added 12-14-2009 at 06:06 AM ----------
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I want to change the world, and I feel strong enough to do so; and what is more, it is essential...I know enough history to realize how empires and civilizations self destruct...People are unconscious of their forms, and even when they set out to change them, it has been like the blind by the braille method...I don't want humanity idealistic...I want them to know how they are manipulated by ideals/forms, how much they serve the form and to recognize that it is the relationship that is the essence of their forms, what the form is for...I want to give everyone a formal understanding of their lives, and the life of all humanity...I don't want people to build the perfect form because that is only a perfect prison... I want people to prize the relationship more than the form...I want people to quit wasting life on the form, to give up on failed forms, and to make forms informal, and to know this power is their own if they can only become form conscious...We are in the same position of millions of others in times past who realized their social forms were sapping their collective life, who felt as most of us do today that they could not comprehend, let alone change their forms... All human progress requires a change of forms, so such change is possible and essential...It is not a tragedy that humanity cannot change itself in any but this superficial fashion...It is, only what it is, a fact, and we must accept it if we would change what is essential for us to change in order to gain the prize of continued life...The knowledge we seek as the catalyst of personal change we must share if we would have social change...
It does not take violence, or protests, or an investment of much time or energy...It is a word to the wise...Humanity has blown its social change because it is primarily a response to a crisis, and managed out of ignorance...The most organized in society seized control and change only as much as was necessary...Revolutionaries cannot manufacture crisises, and if they try to organize before necessary they become a target for repression... Tear down the old... Gnaw at your bars...Forms are not eternal, as humanity may well be...Consider the form..
I suppose what I mean is this. We see politics on the news all the time. People are organized by means of issues. Obama had a majority of voters. What would your platform be that could compete with this?
