But isn't philosophy still about search for truth in the sense of a higher truth or transcendent values? IN which case, the political system or what everyone else is doing, provided they don't infringe on your freedom, don't really matter much. The OP is where can we get wisdom today: same place as always, but it seems more and more remote only because it is more obscured all the time by the meanginless chatter of consumerism. Anyone who wants to dig deep and find lasting values is still able to do that provided they don't look for others to do it for them. It's the road less travelled, that is all.

I think transcending pain and numbing it are quite different. Marx was referring to all the rationales that conventional religion provides the suffering on the Earth - 'it will be alright when you're dead'. It is one of the great lies of religion, in my view and one of the reasons I left my ancestral faith. And wisdom might indeed have a political dimension but it is likely to be very individualist and not corporatist in its outlook (as in small-scale, immediate, local, community based. Probablly rather green-left but with a strong component of small-l liberalism.)

It is a big mistake to think that just because we experience life as individuals that wisdom is likely to be individualistic...

I think transcending pain and numbing it are quite different.

How would anyone go about defining a higher truth against a substrate of simple truth???...An ideal does not do much good if it points in two directions at once... The same with transcendent values...I equate value with meaning, but the only meaning I can think of that transcends, sort of, is life, and that is all meaning, and all value, and to try to find some truth outside of life is a waste...

Reconstructo;111446 wrote:

I see what you're saying here, and to a point I agree. But the social roots of wisdom may stretch back far into our past. I agree with Jung that man has built-in transcendental capacities, and these capacities are built into everyone. I also agree that a living religion is a social expression of this. But in an age when social religion is a dead form, wisdom must be sought more individualistically. For me, wisdom is associated with seeing that we are all, in some way, one. The saint knows that he is also a killer. But the killer most likely does not know that he is also a saint. For me the path of wisdom is an integration of apparent opposites. I feel as though you find a non-social wisdom repellent, perhaps because it is a palliative of otherwise revolutionary discontent. If this is your position, I can understand it. But my life has steered me into a different attitude. I'm too selfish to wait for society to catch up. Life is too short. And when is justice finally attained? And even if we had social justice, life itself is unjust. Disease and accident lurk. While no man is born an island, the island is not a terrible metaphor for a certain kind of wisdom. This might be too monkish or forgiving for your taste. But I offer you an honest response....

Religion is hardly a dead form...As long as people relate through religion it will never be a dead form...It should be a dead form...It shows the failure of our government and economy as standards of rational behavior that people are forced back on failed irrational forms because they offer better social support...

And example of a dead form is one people no longer relate through, like Aristotle's Metaphysics, or the Ptolemaic Universe...It is not that each is not eligant in its way, and to an extent, rational; but they are wrong, and in minds with only room for right such ideas do not have a voice to be heard...People do not relate through them, and this conversation breathes more life into them than they deserve...But it is because they thought badly that we can think better...Nietsche has made not a few grunt holes and a few philosophers because to understand where he is wrong you must have knowledge beyond his own...Such people are a challenge and part of a dialectic... And where we cannot meet such people on the street we can find a Nietzsche in a house of prostitution any day...The world knows more, and to be wise, we must know more still... So; while we tend to think of this one as wise, or that one free, or that one just; the fact is that it is never individual... All these forms are forms of a relationship...No one is anything but alive alone... What we know we were generally taught... We cannot even define our forms without the help of society...No one can be just in an unjust society because not such society could give truth to the word...No one is free or wise but in relation to others, and in the end, to all of humanity...Few of us would normally choose the role of Ishmael, but the outlaw or the philosopher thinking he can see the better side of society outside of it does not judge outside of his community standards...You can go nowhere in the search for absolutes...But meaning is found in relations, relationship, and in relating as a living human being...Every form stands in relation to all others...That is the knowledge that makes humanity and philosophy... How we define, and catagorize knowledge, put ideas and concepts in relation to each other, and to find ourselves between the two is philosophy...It is no different from life in general, but only in the specific of action with intent, (as will) which is not how Aristotle may have defined it... Order out of chaos is our goal... Unity out of asymmetry our purpose...Yet; no one does it alone...

---------- Post added 12-15-2009 at 01:28 AM ----------

Quote:

Good point. Perhaps amphetamine is a better metaphor for transcendence. I can't help but suppose that Marx lumped it all together. And yet he writes movingly of the advantages of culture. He had a real Utopian vision for man. And maybe one day, who knows, man will live like that. But then one thinks of him in the library all day, staring at statistics, living off charity, getting by on the opiate of the future utopia his ideas would hopefully inspire. "The point is to change it." How macho. How materialistic indeed.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche

:p

In the sense of wissen as understanding; yes, since your body understands when it needs food, or sleep and etc...... Much of philosophy to date has been the denial of understanding; confusing abstraction with wisdom...

When is abstraction useful? Is it simply a tool to get at things that cannot be gotten at directly?

When is abstraction useful? Is it simply a tool to get at things that cannot be gotten at directly?

First of all; everything is an abstraction...You cannot think by the movement of physical object, so you must move the abstractions of them, as all forms and concept are...People do the impossible first, in their heads.

I'd say for the philosopher wisdom can be found anywhere and everywhere, as long as you allow for it to appear. Something can be learned by observing and reflecting upon quite literally anything.

The problems in philosophy are literally over nothing... Science is still philosophy, but the physical world has been mastered if we could manage the moral world... Yet, the moral world is full of intangibles... We can weigh a rock, and determine its elements...Not one element of justice can be compared against an element of freedom, for example... All our moral forms are meanings without being...They are nothings at all, and we reflect on them only from the sense that without them, without the virtues, that we die, and we do die without them...Our real lives are made out of so many nothings, and they are imponderables because even to speak of them with any coherence takes a skill long sought after...

First of all; everything is an abstraction...You cannot think by the movement of physical object, so you must move the abstractions of them, as all forms and concept are...People do the impossible first, in their heads.

Everything is an abstraction? All words? Is the concept of a word itself an abstraction? At a certain point it seems that words, at least some of them, are not abstract. Is it an abstraction when someone in a war zone hollers "Get down!"?

How can meanings exist without being? Being is nothingness as Sarte, Heidegger and other phenomenologists would put it, but that doesn't mean being doesn't exist, that would propose quite a paradox. Science has brought us to the attitude that only that which is measurable exists in reality, but there are realities that can't be measured. Hence the need for two ways (quantity and quality) to describe experience.

Heidegger wrote volumes on being, in which he constantly made clear that being is not a thing, and in fact, most "things" in our lives are not even things. We tend to reify concepts, such as God, being, person, etc. but all this does is make it harder to understand. Science is the study of quantifiable things, so in Heidegger's perspective science is not only the study of nothing, but of useless nothings.

All our moral forms are meanings without being

It is possible you mis understand and mis present heidegger...The point is that we see not the thing, Res, from which reality, but our conception of it...For physical reality there is a verifyable being, again, that we will never know completely, and yet know plenty in regard to moral reality which is entirely speculation...

I was just wondering what this statement was presenting.

It seems to be implying that mental images are meanings that don't exist.

Being is existence, therefore, if something is without being, then it doesn't exist.

Maybe you are mis-representing the word being?

No. We exist, and if we find an qusi idea to be real, we give that meaning to it though no true reality can be found for it...These quasi ideas are often what we build our social forms around, so that in the process of living we realize what we only find meaningful at first...

---------- Post added 02-26-2010 at 09:38 PM ----------



The point Heidegger makes concerning reification is that we tend to unnecessarily turn concepts into things. I'm pretty sure that is in line with your theory of abstractness. Something can not be thingy and still exist. Nothing is possible without being, yet being is nothingness.

Yes, that is true about turning concepts into things, and even he was not immune if you can believe his association with the Nazis... Ideas marching oon the feet of men do have a ceratin reality to them...We have known the tyranny of the idea, and should wish it forever past...

For all practical purposes there is no difference between the idea and the thing, and people sort of exist betwen the two, but an idea would not be at all useful if we did not say the thing and conjure the thing in our minds...The concept and the thing are identical, in the proper sense of the principal...