Ignorantia, Aporia, Gnosis
Aporia (befuddlement/bewilderment/puzzlement) has been described as a desirable state to attain. It's etymological roots are impassable passage i.e. one is, quite literally, stuck.
Two essential components of aporia are:
1. One doesn't know where to begin or where to end.
2. One is paralyzed as to what's one's next move.
I find myself constantly in a state of aporia; I sometimes feel that I'm aporia manifested in the physical plane as a person, that's how utterly bewildering the world, the universe, is to me.
Anyway, there are 3 states of mind that seem possible:
1. Ignorance/Ignorantia (this is, I'm told, the state of mind one dislikes the most)
2. Confusion/Aporia (just a fancy word for total bafflement); a constant source of irritation/vexation for me and others like me)
3. Gnosis/Knowledge (the holy grail of philosophy, excluding those philosophers who think aporia is more their thing)
I would like to open the floor for discussion as to the merits.demerits of these 3 epistemological mind states.
Two essential components of aporia are:
1. One doesn't know where to begin or where to end.
2. One is paralyzed as to what's one's next move.
I find myself constantly in a state of aporia; I sometimes feel that I'm aporia manifested in the physical plane as a person, that's how utterly bewildering the world, the universe, is to me.
Anyway, there are 3 states of mind that seem possible:
1. Ignorance/Ignorantia (this is, I'm told, the state of mind one dislikes the most)
2. Confusion/Aporia (just a fancy word for total bafflement); a constant source of irritation/vexation for me and others like me)
3. Gnosis/Knowledge (the holy grail of philosophy, excluding those philosophers who think aporia is more their thing)
I would like to open the floor for discussion as to the merits.demerits of these 3 epistemological mind states.
Comments (109)
Both Aporia and Knowledge are pretty interesting states of mind but I want to put another element in these two: happiness. This is the real holy grail of philosophy if we take the Aristotle perspective. It is one of the main goals the humans always fought for.
Probably, thanks to knowledge and Aporia we can end up at being happy.
This is what I found on Wikipedia:
[quote=Wikiepedia]In Pyrrhonism aporia is intentionally induced as a means of producing ataraxia.[/quote]
Aporia is somehow supposed to (magically?) lead us directly to the doorstep of Epicurus (re: hedonism). How that's achieved is a mystery to me! Like I said, aporia is not exactly my idea of fun!
On balance, it's more painful than pleasurable, and I don't quite see how that's a description of equanimity, tranquility (ataraxia).
It appears that journey through ataraxia (the way of the warrior, bushido?) is, again somehow, supposed to end at eudaimonia aka happiness!
A fool is ignorant, a real fool is confused and who wouldn't want to live in paradise, a fool's paradise?
It is a mistery indeed and that's because it is very complex to achieve. We can say it is upon us what we consider as the path of Aporia (or doorstep) in terms of making or own decisions or choices.
Quoting Agent Smith
I never heard about ataraxia, and it is another interesting aspect. Probably we can say here that achieving tranquility is a very painful path to cross. But if we are only in our confort zone we would never experience the richness of life. Thus, we can be fools in a fool's land
This is a more reliable indication of what the term means. Reasoning encounters a point beyond which it cannot go. A point at which we are confronted by our ignorance without a way to move past it to truth and knowledge.
Plato's dialogues typically end in aporia. In order to see this in a positive light we need to consider Socrates' "human wisdom", his knowledge of his ignorance. This means more than simply acknowledging that he does not know. It is an inquiry and examination into how best to live knowing that we do not know what is best.
:up:
This is what came to mind when I read your first post - I have found, personally, that a confusing situation resolves itself when you give up, surrender, to the uncertainty. Alan Watts has a book called "The Wisdom of Insecurity." That surrender of will is part of many spiritual traditions. Looking in from the outside, it's always seemed to me that Zen practice is set up to frustrate practitioners and that enlightenment is a final surrender.
Quoting Fooloso4
I wonder if you are talking about the same thing I am.
The limits of reason is a common theme. How one responds to that may differ. I don't think there is anything equivalent to enlightenment through surrender in Plato or Aristotle.
For me, the question is whether the spiritual phenomena described in the two different philosophies represent the same, or similar, human experiences. I think they probably do.
Is it truly aporia, or is it a case of finding oneself in a socioeconomic situation where one "far behind others"?
There is a difference between aporia, and the overwhelm that a particular person may feel upon realizing how much they in particular would need to do in order to barely measure up as an "average citizen".
This overwhelm also has the two elemetns
[i]1. One doesn't know where to begin or where to end.
2. One is paralyzed as to what's one's next move.[/i]
but in this overwhelm, there are practical, tangible causes for the confusion and paralysis.
:up: Mu/Wu. Analysis paralysis, not exactly, but close enough for government work.
Quoting Fooloso4
:up:
Much like all threads in this forum and others too I suppose. No resolution but more confusion.
Quoting Fooloso4
:up:
How does aporia bring about ataraxia and ataraxia lead to eudaimonia?
Mu!
Quoting T Clark
Mu/Wu!
Possible! Different illnesses, sometimes, have identical symptoms.
:ok:
:chin:
And that word has two very different meanings in philosophy. Ignorance in the everyday sense plainly concerns some facts or states of affairs we don't know, or some knowledge or understanding we lack. But 'ignorance' in another sense also means lack of sagacity or wisdom, in Indic religions it means the absence of 'vidya' (that being true insight or wisdom). In that context, 'ignorance' is a condition of benightedness or foolishness that comes from not understanding what is real. (In Buddhist cultures, it is seen as the default condition of the 'puttajjana', the 'uneducated worldling', which sits rather uneasily with democratic liberalism.)
But there's another set of meanings altogether, which is communicated in classics such as 'the cloud of unknowing'. That is associated with the 'negative way' of contemplative meditation - self-emptying or putting aside all discursive thought and reasoning. There are elements of that in the Socratic attitude but it is not something that ought to be over-emphasised. You also find that in Taoism - 'he that knows it, knows it not, he that knows it not, knows it'.
Gnosis is another subject altogether. It doesn't really have a uniform or single definition, and can only be defined in the various contexts in which the word is used. You could say that gnosis consists of an insight into the nature of being which by default the ordinary man doesn't know, and which requires a cognitive (or meta-cognitive) shift in order to attain. Gnostics would typically describe their knowledge in terms of an insight into or penetration of a principle which liberates the knower from the vicissitudes of ignorance. But again it's a deep subject. Have a peruse of gnosis.org, there's a lot of source material there.
So ignorance is not simply a state of not knowing, but is to be construed as an absence of wisdom (vidya). The distinction between knowledge and wisdom clearly matter to the concept of aporia, it (aporia) being a term applicable to the wise fool. The wise fool is ignorant, yes, but s/he is, at the same time, much the wiser for it. What makes a wise fool both wise and fool? Pray tell.
The cloud of unknowing? Sounds interesting.
Quoting Wayfarer
I consider these meditative techniques as, inter alia, means of experiencing nonexistence while existing given how much existence to us seem completely predicated on thinking (about something) - we've been inured into believing that until and unless there's something (objects of thought) in the vessel (mind), the vessel (mind) doesn't exist. It's like being trapped in the middle of a dark room with only a football for company. One kicks the football and when it bounces off the walls of the room, one happily concludes "oh yes, there's a room, I'm in it." Without the football (thoughts), I would never have figured out that there's a room (the mind). Does the mind (the room) persist/exist even when there's no football (no thoughts)? That's the million dollar question insofar as philosophers of mind are concerned! I mentioned the so-called Mu/Wu mind state in Zen. Do you have any comments on that?
Gnosis, as appears in the OP, is simply knowledge. I'm aware that gnosis has a more specific meaning in some circles and am willing to discuss it. You compared gnosis to insight and I find that very appealing, somehow it feels right to me. It squares with your take on ignorance as not simply unknowing, but avidya (absence of wisdom), insight being a mark of wisdom in my humble opinion.
There's a biblical saying that the wisdom of God is folly to the world ('For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.') It has been interpreted to support crass anti-intellectualism by fundamentalism but I think the meaning is more subtle than that. The figure of the 'stupid wise man' is a cross-cultural meme, often appearing as a vagabond or itinerant wanderer, turning up in stories as seeming fools who in the end reveal their wisdom through some deed or gesture. (It's even echoed in the Lennon McCartney song The Fool on the Hill.)
Quoting Agent Smith
Zen is often depicted in popular culture as easy-going and spontaneous. In its original cultural setting it's an arduous path. Yes, it is possible to get some insights into such states, sometimes they even arise spontaneously, but in practice Zen requires considerable discipline and commitment. It bears some similarity to what is called 'flow', attaining a sense of complete unity with what you're engaged in, but I think there's a lot more to it in that in the Zen context. (One of the first books I read about it was the well-known D T Suzuki book The Zen Doctrine of No-mind.)
Gnosis has a more specific meaning than knowledge. Actually there's really nothing that maps against gnosis in secular culture - perhaps advanced knowledge of scientific principles might be comparable, but gnosis is an existential discipline, not a third-person objective science. You can possess extraordinary degrees of knowledge about a lot of subjects whilst still not obtaining gnosis. It is usually understood to be understanding the factors that bind you to ignorance but again there's nothing that really maps against that in secular Western culture.
I put myself in ancient or Classical Greece. Whenever the school of Athens was active.
I argue with people what is best for us, what is the best way to live. What is it that we know, don't know, can't know, and in this quagmire of knowables we create collective nouns for some concepts.
So far so good.
The we take these concepts and we reason out how to handle these concepts and how to apply them to our lives in order to live the best lives we possibly can.
We are all middle-class intellectuals: we have slaves to do jobs for us, but we are not independently wealthy, and we are all rather intelligent.
Then after an afternoon's worth of debate we go home, eat a mediocre meal, screw our wives, (one each) and go to sleep.
In the meantime!!!!!
In the meantime the rich: the oligarchs, the patriarchs, the patricians, whatever you want to call them, eat really tasty food, well-spiced, with exotic fruits, and drinking to it expensive, heavy wines; and after dinner they sample their harems of very beautiful women.
I can't escape the comparison between their society and ours. In those years there was an abandon of intellectual thought; these days there is an abandon of mediocre tv. Both for the middle classes. We are told now to buy a new car to be happy, or a tv with a huge screen, or take a vacation in the Bahamas, or to go on a website to find dates, or to go to this or that store to buy apparel, or to buy pizza from this or that pizza place. This we are told to do become happy.
The ancients or Classicals were told to figure out in an intellectually intuitive way what makes them happy.
In the meantime the rich in both societies reap the delights available to humans in ways the middle class can't even fathom.
So the bottom of it is that creating concepts like aporia, integratia, rupertonia, etc. etc. you call them what ever you want, and figuring out how to navigate them in your life to become happy are mere ersatz, are poor attempts at rationalizing to help self-suggest happiness, much the same as you amass useless junk in your home in these modern times to lull yourself into believing you are happy.
While, in effect, the route to happiness is completely different.
Well said. However, the Greeks were no fools. They knew about everything you said. And being Greek they had a philosophy to fit the occasion. It was Cynicism - live the simple life, the life of a dog, turning your back on the emptiness of social distinctions and material wealth. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cynic-ancient-Greek-philosophy
We live in a time when there is a sub-culture which adores and idolizes the Greek culture of thought. I feel that that is overplayed. There is nothing in the Greek culture that a smart person in our age could not develop on his own using his or her own brains. And collectively, as a society, we have surpassed the Greek culture collectively as a society in wisdom.
True enough, there are also sub-cultures in our present society which are lightyears below and behind the thought-achievements of the Greeks. My answer to that is that there were people then too, who took no note of the constantly arguing philosophers in the School of Athens.
Quoting god must be atheist
Well, I'm a Cynic in the more modern sense. I would not say that we have surpassed Greek culture in wisdom, only that we rival them in folly. There continues a lot to learn from the Greeks and learning from them does not mean deferring to them as authorities.
You're advocating that there be a Geometry Man? Saving the world from evil second-degree equations and from hideous indefinite integrals from outer space. Oha! (Marvel at Euclid.)
Sorry, not to diminish the gravity of your post... just I came from the ShoutBox forum and I m still in "Very silly mood".
They also didn't engender the scientific revolution.
Damn.... Best argument I've ever seen from you...
:fire:
Squares with how goodness and naïvety are confused with each other. Is it wise to be good or is it folly extremum? Satyam (verum) Shivam (godliness/bonum) Sundaram (pulchrum)?
Hitler was never considered a fool, evil yes, but no, never an imbecile. Yet, if one gives it some thought, Hitler comes off as a complete idiot. That's the flip side of the coin.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, theory and practice, not the same! I think Zen proponents tend to present their audience with a much simplified version of Zen so as not to spook them. Makes sense. Let the fish bite the hook first, the line and sinker for later.
Quoting Wayfarer
:fire:
I'll get back to you if I have any further questions.
G'day mate!
Bafflement may be frustrating, but it can also be stimulating . . . . for those with a curious mind. :joke:
Do you suppose people who recommend aporia (bafflement) as a healthy state of mind were conflating it with "awe and wonder". The latter (awe and wonder) seems to be more appealing than the former (aporia). Perhaps the one is a synonym for the other. Sabrá Mandrake!
I read the Wikipedia article on "The Cloud of Unknowing." The quotes included seemed really down to earth and practical, just, as you intimated, like the Tao Te Ching. I have been saying, without really thinking it through, that the experience of God is the evidence for God. Maybe it will help me develop a more robust understanding. I downloaded a PDF version and uploaded it to my Kindle.
I think this is a fairly widely held view - the evidence is embodied in the experience. My reservations with this as a crass naturalist, is what counts as experience of god? Without wanting to be glib, I have no doubt that members of Islamic State and the KKK have had experiences of God which help form their beliefs and actions.
Quoting Tom Storm
It is a horrible fact of life that the apparently-devout can participate in such terrible atrocities. But I regard this as an indication of human weakness, rather than as anything intrinsic to spirituality. Recall that many of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century were committed for political or nationalistic causes. Humans are capable of corrupting anything.
As for the nature of religious or spiritual experiences, there's a lot of literature on that. Seeking to understand it was why I had enrolled in comparative religion back in my early days. William James' book Varieties of Religious Experience is an example.
Obviously there is a lot of cultural conditioning associated with religion - in fact for many people that's all religion can ever be. But there's a different kind of spirituality which is, I suppose you could say, more natural, comprising those insights arising from who knows where - the wind blows where it lists - tapping into that, somehow, is the key, although it's generally elusive.
I'm a non-theist who is sympathetic to religion. Your questions are good ones for which I don't have any specific answers. On the other hand, bad people can justify themselves with any kind of belief - religious, philosophical, political, nationalistic, moral...
My thoughts in this regard are mainly in reaction to those who say there is no evidence for God. There is evidence, they just aren't convinced by it. That makes a big difference to me.
I'm sure it's come up on the forum before. I just haven't followed up on it.
I think that's correct. As an atheist I take this view too. I would even include scripture as evidence. How one regards or rates this evidence is a different matter.
In the absolutist context:
1. Ignorance (even of the questions)
2. Knowing the questions, uncertainty of the answers
3, Delusory certainty.
In relative contexts:
1,Ignorance.
2. Learning
3. Knowledge
So, in my view aporia is indeed the wise state in relation to so-called "ultimate questions".
Yes. I agree.
Maybe Einstein was a closet magician, pretending to be a mere scientist. He often attributed his curiosity about Nature to its inspiring "awe & wonder". But, instead of trading on occult mystery, he revealed the smoke & mirrors that had long concealed the underlying magic of reality. :cool:
One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day."
___Albert Einstein
:fire:
Quoting T Clark
"Evidence for God" such as? A dozen years of Catholic education (including Bible Study and altar boy service) as well as over a decade more of earnest comparative religions study, yet thirty-odd years on and this so-called "evidence" still eludes me. :eyes:
Quoting Agent Smith
My two drachmas in the agora's wishing well:
1. illusions of knowing (i.e. not to know that one does not know)
2. understanding 'one does not, perhaps cannot, know completely / with certainty (i.e. an intractable perplexity)
3. knowing what one does not know (i.e. understanding 'the more one knows also includes the more one does not, perhaps cannot, know')
The examined life pursues self-understanding, no? :death: :flower:
I'll get back to you. Thanks.
As I noted, the fact that you don't consider something good evidence doesn't mean it isn't evidence. That's one of the things reason is supposed to do, provide a process for working these things out. Your typical smarty-pants response does not constitute reason.
What's understanding?
Aporia, whatever else it might be, gives me the impression that it includes, as part of experiencing it, the grasp of the major (and minor) aspects of a problem at hand. The end result of a philosophical analysis terminating at two points:
1. The assumptions/presuppositions (where did we begin?).
2. The methodologies employed (what technique are we using?)
My hunch is that once a (real/true) philosophical analysis is complete, what we end up with is
1. A list of unknowns, some of them probably unknowable.
2. A critique of our methodologies.
This end point is, in my humble opinion, aporia, literally meaning "difficulty in passage". We're stuck so to speak.
Clearly, awe and wonder is an emotional experience even if brought on by the application of cold, unfeeling rationality.
In my childhood days, I recall quite enjoying the experience of utter bafflement even though it was brought on by the simplest of things (I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer). As an adult, that primal joy has been replaced by annoyance, anxiety, and anger. I remain as perplexed as ever, but I now dislike it, it's not fun anymore.
Here's an old post addressing this question. Another sketch of understanding excerpted from a different old post.
Don't forget the use of aporia by our beloved leaders...
"Can it really be, my fellow partisans? Were they truly considering this? Did it actually cross their minds? My mouth fell open wide, sweet comrades! It cannot be. It will not be!! It won't be!!! Brothers, in aaarms!!!!"
You mean a philosopher is a computer? A computer has no understanding. Without understanding no knowledge. Understanding means being what you wanna understand. Learning is being. Understanding is learning is being. But why doing this eternally?
My takeaway from the post you linked to:
1. Form vs. content. Very important concepts as far as I can tell.
2. (Over)simplify. I like the sound of that. Very mathematical. In a gravitational equation the sun which can swallow up a million earths is but a point. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
If I've missed anything, do lemme know. :up:
Quoting EugeneW
:lol: I don't wanna talk to you!
???????????????........
Amaaaazing....
DOES NOT COMPUTE! = APORIA!
Exactly! Being in aporiaticalistic state means being unable to compute. We're all Aporians, living close to Ignorantia. Gnosis of Philo has had his cynosure days, ruling from the hierarchy apex.
:lol:
This is just more anti-religious bigotry, so prevalent here on the forum.
It's anti-"because I say so" bigotry, sir. :shade:
:clap: Magnifique!
A bad workman blames his tools!
To be fair, many religions are pragmatically-challenged i.e. many of their injunctions are quite simply undoable, clearly beyond the reach of (say) 90% of people. One could even say that to be a person of faith, one has to be superhuman. So much for Nietzsche and his übermensch, supposedly beings that emerge from the mortal remains of God. :chin:
My approach is counter-cultural - that both sides of the ‘religion v science’ mindset grow out of the same historical background and mirror each other in some vital sense. That’s why for a lot of people in my generation, alternative and Eastern religious ideas provided a circuit-breaker, a way out of the interminable deadlock in Western culture which Nietzsche also criticised (although in my view there was something profoundly lacking in his understanding of it.)
That has allowed me to re-interpret the meaning of religious ideas at least to some extent, knowing that in some real sense, there are no answers, the existential plight of existence remains as it always has been. And yet……
One question that arises is to what extent the original message is corrupt. For example, Abram's sacrifice of his son Isaac is held up as the height of faith. It seems to me that at best this should have occasioned aporia. How could God demand such a thing? Have I (Abram) understood it correctly? But there is no evidence in the story of even a moment of hesitation or questioning.
It is not as if he never questioned God. With regard to Sodom and Gomorrah:
(Genesis 18:23)
His concern for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah seems odd in contrast to his seeming lack of concern for his son.
Socrates questions Euthyphro regarding his self-proclaimed knowledge of piety. An aporia arises regarding the problem of reconciling what it is he imagines the gods want of him and what is just. This raises the question of what is to serve as the measure of the corruption of spirituality? Was the Inquisition a corruption or the logical response to the importance of saving the eternal soul, even if it comes at the cost of pain and suffering during the short time we are on the earth?
It certainly seems like that from the perspective of our culture 2,600 odd years later. But all ancient cultures were built around sacrifices. Sacrifice was a way of repaying to God or the gods what man had been given or had taken. It was an inevitable consequence of the development of human self-awareness with its realisation of loss, pain and death. Our animal forbears have no such burdens. Many religions still observe sacrificial rituals to this day. (There has only been one globally significant religious culture that does not include sacrificial ritual, and that is Buddhism.)
Jesus' crucifiction was understood as the sacrifice that put an end to the need for all sacrifice - hence 'the lamb of God', the final sacrifice, that reconciled humanity and God for all time.
I think from an anthropological perspective the need for or meaning of sacrifice in that archaic sense is no longer understood. We recognise and applaud self-sacrifice in the sense of foregoing one's own advantage for the sake of others, but not the literal idea of sacrifice that animated the earlier cultures. So, sure, from our perspective, it seems an irrational and cruel demand. But 'the past is a [s]different[/s] foreign country, they do things differently there.'
Quoting Fooloso4
I very much doubt it. But even despite the evils of the Inquisition, I would still like to think that the Christian religion is not inherently corrupt or wicked.
When I studied comparative religion, I formed the idea that some fundamental element or perspective was forgotten or missed at the formation of Christian orthodoxy, that being the idea of 'experiential realisation', that is found in Eastern religious cultures with their emphasis on meditative experience.
That element, I felt, was more characteristic of the gnostic movements (not that there was any one thing called Gnosticism). I found the work of Elaine Pagels, based on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codex. She argues in her book Beyond Belief (review here) that the formation of early Christianity was marked by an internal struggle within the Church between the gnostic and pistic (faith-based) factions, with the latter eventually prevailing. The gnostic style of interpretation was much more characteristic of the Gospel of Thomas, which was rejected by the redactors of the Bible as a consequence of this struggle.
It was much more convergent with the kind of spirituality that myself and many others of my generation were seeking than the time-worn tropes of Churchianity.
Your frustration may be due, in part, to unrealistic expectations. When I was young, I learned the hard way that I was a perfectionist, who couldn't deal with his own imperfections. As you grow older though, you learn to lower your expectations. Especially in Philosophy, Ideals are an impossible dream. Ambition is good, in moderate doses. :cool:
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" ___Robert Browning
It's quite possible that you're right on the money. I am kinda sorta perfectionist, although looking back I see no evidence of it in anything I've been involved in. I'm sloppy and lazy, always looking for shortcuts and cheat codes if you know what I mean.
Let's put this discussion back on track. A while ago, that's a coupla moons, I came to the conclusion that being unsure/uncertain (skepticism) makes decisions impossible for, as per my own thoughts on the matter, decision-making can only be done based on propositions being either true or false (not both or unknown or neither).
Aporia, puzzlement, is a state when the truth of some relevant propositions are undecidable (truth value unknown) and that's supposed to be a good thing in re making good decisions.
As you can see these two don't jibe with each other: on the one hand knowing is better than not knowing (2[sup]nd[/sup] paragraph above) as decisions can only be made knowing what's true and what's false and on the other hand, there's this belief that we make high quality decisions when we're confused (aporia, 3[sup]rd[/sup] paragraph above).
These two antipodal views both makes sense and does not is an instance of aporia (for me).
Can you help clear up the matter for me?
First, what you skip over is that not only was this a human sacrifice, it was a sacrifice of his own son. Second, Abram's unquestioning obedience continues to be held up to this day as the highest example of faith. Third:
(Deuteronomy 12:31)
What he was about to do, and in earlier versions might have done, is expressly forbidden by God. It may be that this reflects later changes regarding human sacrifice, but this together with claims about what was then common practice relativizes and shifts from divine to human standards. The connection between the spiritual and what transcends the human is severed.
Quoting Wayfarer
My next question was going to be, which version of Christianity.
Quoting Wayfarer
This understates the case to the point of misrepresentation. The Church Father's suppression of other beliefs, witnesses, testimonies, practices, and gospels was ruthless. Their methods point to a corruption that began early on. But of course from the perspective of what you call "Churchianity" the kind of spirituality you were seeking was a corruption.
The other point that may be worth considering is the cultural origin of the idea that all human lives are sacrosanct. There were contemporaneous cultures, for example Incan culture, where human sacrifice was conducted on a massive scale - which we rightly regard as abhorrent, also condemned in that passage you quoted. And even today, in some cultures - I'm thinking of the People's Republic of China - there is a willingness to sacrifice individual lives, or even cultural identities, for the supposed stability of the society (likewise, abhorrent), reflecting what we regard as a fundamental abrogation of human rights. So - whence this idea that every human life is sacred in the first place? I would suggest that a large part of it originated from Christian social philosophy and their doctrine of universal salvation, even acknowledging the undeniable horrors that the Church has sometimes visited on the world.
There was a massive ferment of beliefs in the early Christian era. The Gnostic Valentinus came within a few votes of being elected Pope. I think had it turned out differently, we might have a very different kind of world. That's why there has been an upsurge of the kind of alternative religious narratives that have attracted me and many others. My attitude is that there are many things wrong about Christianity and with religions generally, but that those faults are a matter of a misguided understanding - not that the truths embodied in religion are false as a matter of principle, simply because everything religious is mistaken. I understand that a lot of people are atheist or anti-religious and I generally don't try and persuade them otherwise, but in my view, the religious or spiritual dimension of life is real, and its denial amounts to a lack. It also subtly conditions what are and are not considered viable philosophical ideas.
Quoting Fooloso4
One of the many books I read was called 'A Different Christianity: Early Christian Esotericism and Modern Thought ', Robin Amis. 'This book presents the esoteric original core of Christianity, with its concern for illuminating and healing the inner life of the individual. It is a bridge to the often difficult doctrines of the early church fathers, explaining their spiritual psychology, which underlies the spirituality of the Greek church.' Had I discovered that variety of Christianity earlier in life, things might have turned out differently. But I know if I started going to a local Church it would be a very, very different experience to that.
All or none thinking (in psychology known as splitting). The person who's affected by splitting fails to recognize and appreciate subtleties and nuances. Throwing the baby out with the bath water, not a wise move.
Quoting Wayfarer
:clap: Excelente! Human sacrifice is still rampant (the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few/one) in modern society, only it's no longer done with a knife/sword/poison like in the good ol' days; just like how racism has taken a more subtle form in this day and age, human sacrifice happens without shedding even a drop of blood.
One word, paradox, designed specifically to elicit/evoke/bring on aporia of the finest quality philosophy has to offer. There are so many paradoxes that one can even pick and choose i.e. customize one's experience of (utter) bafflement.
Money back guarantee.
The whole of Christianity? The story is far older than Christianity. By the time Deuteronomy was written in the 7th century BCE human sacrifice was expressly forbidden. How this troubling story is to be understood and whether in earlier versions he was sacrificed is still in dispute.
Quoting Wayfarer
Hillel is credited with saying:
Spiritual is a nebulous term. What I take issue with is the transfer of human concerns to the transcendent, as if we can look elsewhere to find answers to the problems of life, to a savior or to some set of rules that come from man but are regarded as having a supernatural origin. On the one hand we abdicate responsibility and on the other imbue what we are responsible for with divine authority.
Here we come back to the original topic of aporia and the Socratic problem of learning to live in ignorance. We are limited beings with limited capacities. We need to work within those capacities rather than hope for a god or book or lost wisdom that might be recovered to save us. In acknowledging our limits we should not give them false divine authority:
The muses tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth. (Theogony 27)
My knowledge about the history of philosophy is limited, so I can't provide a very good defense of this position, but it always strikes me that people fail to understand the extent to which Christianity provides the foundation for western culture and philosophy.
Quoting Wayfarer
This is one of my primary arguments against rabid atheism. Whatever you believe about the existence of God or the effects of religion on society, there is an important sense in which religious people understand the universe more clearly than those who reject the spiritual dimension you're talking about.
I'm always surprised by how similar many of my ideas are to yours given that we come to them from such different perspectives.
If you knowledge of the history of philosophy were less limited you would know that there is no basis for this claim. The roots on which Christianity is founded are in the Greeks and Judaism. Plato's influence on Augustine and Aristotle's influence on Aquinas is evident.
Quoting T Clark
What about the mild mannered atheism of those who simply do not believe in gods?
Quoting T Clark
First of all, one need not be a theist to be "spiritual". Second, religious people often do not see eye to eye and so it cannot be said they understand the universe more clearly when throughout history their disagreement has often been deadly. Each may believe that they to the exclusion of others are in possession of the truth.
I don't see how your statement and mine are in conflict.
Collingwood claims that western science would not be possible without a belief in a God like the Christian's.
Quoting Fooloso4
I was not talking about them.
Quoting Fooloso4
True.
Quoting Fooloso4
I believe it can.
Quoting Fooloso4
The question of whether religious institutions are more warlike than secular ones has been argued here many times before without resolution.
You seem to be saying that aporia is the beginning (a state of readiness), but is it not also the middle and end?
Or could it be that we are perennial beginners? Does wisdom grow within the aporia?
"Xenophanes espoused a belief that "God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind." He maintained there was one greatest God."
He was dissatisfied with the plurality of the gods living their happy lives on Olympus Mountain. Too confusing. He longed for unity, and invented a new, super human, super powerful, unimaginable god, leading ultimately to the omnipotent God as found in the Bible and Koran.
Plato loved the man, and considering his mathematical only approximately knowable, extramundane reality, a reality encountered in modern science:
Among the few other Greek writers who subsequently mentioned Xenophanes are Plato, who said that “The Eleatic school, beginning with Xenophanes and even earlier, starts from the principle of the unity of all things,”
What's aporia gotta do with this? I think it's a rather baffling observation, that two men can change the course of history that dramatically.
But: is it "aha!" or being in awe?
Perhaps my mixed metaphor confused you. Judaism and Greece are the foundations of the west not Christianity. Christianity is built on those foundations.
Quoting T Clark
I can't comment without reading what he said in context. What is a God like the Christian's? The God Jesus, and Paul, and the disciples called Father? In that case, it is the God of Judaism. Or is it the man/god of Greek apotheosis?
Quoting T Clark
I did not ask or address that question. What I said was, religious people often do not see eye to eye and so it cannot be said they understand the universe more clearly. How can they both understand the universe more clearly and yet understand it so differently?
Yes. Don't treat Truth & Falsity as "antipodal", but as a continuum between those poles.
As a recovering Perfectionist or Idealist, you need to accept that you will never know absolute Truth about anything. Nor will anyone else you encounter. That's partly due to the inherent uncertainties of the physical world, and to the intrinsic limitations of the human mind. Ironically, a common rhetorical tactic (on forums) is to present the appearance of personal Omniscience, or appeal to Authority (such as all-knowing Science), in order to manipulate confused or unsure people. Like Infinity, Comprehensive Truth is an ideal state that is never encountered in the real world.
Unkowns and mysteries are potentially dangerous, but also potentially-fruitful fields to plow . . . . carefully. Remember, Philosophy idealizes absolute Truth, but makes-do with approximate pragmatic truths, that it optimistically labels as practical "Wisdom". :smile:
Fitch’s paradox of knowability concerns any theory committed to the thesis that all truths are knowable. . . . The operative concept of “knowability” remains elusive but is meant to fall somewhere between equating truth uninformatively with what God would know and equating truth naively with what humans actually know. Equating truth with what God would know does not improve intelligibility, and equating it with what humans actually know fails to appreciate the objectivity and discoverability of truth.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
Pragmatic Truth :
Unlike correspondence theories, which tend to see truth as a static relation between a truth-bearer and a truth-maker, pragmatic theories of truth tend to view truth as a function of the practices people engage in, and the commitments people make, when they solve problems, make assertions, or conduct scientific inquiry ...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/
SUBJECTIVE TRUTH
For almost 1,000 years, the only philosophers in Europe were in the church. The church was the main thing that unified the west between the end of the Roman Empire and the Treaty of Westphalia. The church brought the philosophy of Greece to the west. The church transmitted a form of Judaism to the west. Did you think I meant that 2,000 years ago, St. Paul created the entire structure of western civilization without reference to what came before. I didn't.
Quoting Fooloso4
You're right, I did misinterpret your comment.
In philosophy, nobody agrees with anybody. Why would you expect religious/spiritual people to be any different? If you only allow philosophies with no confusion or disagreement... well, there's nothing left. Scientology I guess. Branch Davidianism.
You know the saying, 'many paths up the mountain' :wink:
[quote=John Hick, Who or What is God; http://www.johnhick.org.uk/article1.html]The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.
What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical or theological construction. Christian experience of the presence of God, for example, at least in the early days and again since the 13th-14th century rediscovery of the centrality of the divine love, is the sense of a greater, much more momentously important, much more profoundly loving, personal presence than that of one’s fellow humans. But that this higher presence is eternal, is omnipotent, is omniscient, is the creator of the universe, is infinite in goodness and love is not, because it cannot be, given in the experience itself. In sense perception we can see as far as our horizon but cannot see how much further the world stretches beyond it, and so likewise we can experience a high degree of goodness or of love but cannot experience that it reaches beyond this to infinity. [/quote]
Aporia seems to be designed for those who desire perfection; for those who can manage with the messy world as it is (fuzzy logic or some other means), aporia isn't a part of their lives. Lower the bar and everything is hunky-dory! I'm somewhat happy now! We were supposed to read between the lines! :smile:
Fortunately, in fact, Western "culture and philosophy" has been predominantly anti-foundationalist since the late 1500s CE (re: nominalism Copernicus/Galileo, secularism, empiricism, Wallace/Darwin, pragmatism ...)
The problem is that without a verifiable ground of experience then whatever one might imagine can become a "manifestation" of the "Ultimate". Hicks does note these cultural constructs but attempts to explain them away.
I don't know what that means.
that's positivism.
It is not positivism. You tend to see things that are opposed to your own view through that lens. The notion of verification is much much older than positivism.
Incidentally, I do agree that religions don't generally 'see eye-to-eye' and that there is a huge history of conflict in that field, both between and within religions. So I'm not disputing that. John Hick is a philosopher of religion and an advocate of religious pluralism, 'based on the notion that the world is religiously ambiguous, such that it can be experienced either religiously or non-religiously, with no compelling proofs for or against any one religious or nonreligious interpretation of the world....He argues not only that the world is sufficiently ambiguous to allow it to be interpreted religiously in different ways but also that there is parity among each of the major world religions regarding their soteriological and ethical efficacy. As far as can be judged by human observation, no one religion stands out above the rest in terms of its ability to transform lives. Moreover, no one religion can lay claim to being the only context for authentic religious experiences.'
As I see it, there is a crucial difference a religious experience and whatever meaning and significance that might have for the person experiencing it and a claim that what is experienced is an experience of the "ultimate" that reaches "beyond to infinity."
Emptiness is the only spiritual concept that I think, or feel, gives me clearer understanding of the universe. True that it’s a religious concept, even though I’m anti-religious. It makes rational sense while at the same time relieves existential anxiety. I can’t imagine it not being true and yet I don’t know if it is true. Perhaps somehow things can have an essential and independent existence.
Preliminary analysis suggests that ietsism/somethingism is proto-religion, it is how all religions began (that feeling/intuition that reality is far richer than she lets on). Some have come to definitive conclusions (gods, souls, spirits, and so on), others tend to stick around in ietsism, unperturbed by the absence of clear-cut answers to their deepest questions.
:sad: Too bad, I thought you might wanna sink your teeth into it. I miscalculated. Sorry.
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH!
Here’s a boomer anthem to global awakening and one of my favorite songs.
I think @180 Proof is referring to the ongoing Enlightenment project of human knowledge which has incrementally dismantled the notion of god/s and the usefulness of religious models as a foundation for all human thought - also the unravelling of Greek models of absolute reality such as Platonism.
The Inquisition?
But hey, who the hell is Immanuel Kant that we should kowtow to him, oui?
What's the alternative though? Become an obnoxious, persnickety, control freak? 'Twixt the Devil and deep blue sea, 'twixt the Devil and the deep blue sea!
Calm down, take a deep breath Agent Smith, there's always aurea mediocritas, we can have the best of both worlds. Eclecticism at its apogee.
See ya around, mate!
Got a reference for that?
Quoting Tom Storm
No, not what I had in mind. Some way in which human existence is part of a cosmic story, and not simply a fluke occurence, the by-product of chance and necessity.
No, I overheard someone saying it. Does that damage my credibility? :sad:
Fascinating!
:ok: :up:
I think there are many ways to describe the experience of God or spirituality I'm talking about. As usual, my approach comes from an intellectual direction. Someday I'll start a thread "T Clark Finally Puts an End to All This Philosophy Bullshit" and explain it.
Thanks. I still don't see what that has to do with my point. No, no... Please don't explain.
Is it going to pit language against philosophy, à la Wittgenstein?
2. Can see (No Fear, but No Tranquility)
3. Don't see (Tranquility)
You'll just have to wait to see.
I hope you don't post it before I post the thread that makes all of modern philosophy redundant or superfluous... The final truth will be told once and for all.