the (bad?) art of metaphysics

Jan 12, 2005 17:57

So I'm going to be sitting in on a philosophy of language seminar at UPitt, given by Robert Brandom. The first class was yesterday and very exciting -- Brandom has a new theory/formalism of "pragmatic metalanguages" that he wants to debug before giving the Locke Lectures next year. I won't try to relate the introduction he gave yesterday, ( Read more... )

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Natural tendencies self_referent January 24 2005, 07:58:09 UTC
Most people are unwilling to straighten out their minds. They remain warped because they feel safer that way. They suffer from illusions (even though these illusions may have, in the past, made it easier for them to reproduce and propagate relative to objective folks).

Many people believe that "ultimately, there is justice when all is said and done [in this life]", even though we can easily come up with counterexamples. For instance, just take a stroll through a hospital. Talk to a five-year-old boy with a terminal illness. Talk to the family that has lost it all because their primary wage-earner has been killed by a drunk driver. Etc. Talk to the people who look at a cancer patient and try to figure out what the person did wrong in his life to end up that way (often, the person was perfectly innocent in many ways - but they desperately want to justify her condition, they desperately want to maintain the illusion of control over their lives). "Guilt is the stony heart of all cancers" is a line I came across while reading a very clever short story recently. I don't agree with it. It's not objective.

Many people want to believe that our bodies are well-designed, that they are the pinnacle of creation, that they should not be tampered with. If these assertions were true, we would not so easily die in car/airplane/etc. crashes. We are incredibly fragile.

Most want to believe that Nature is wonderful, when in fact Nature is the ultimate killer, indiscriminately and insensibly destroying all life. It allows us to build ourselves up, some of us to extremely high levels of ability and wisdom and worth, only to be torn down to (literally) nothing. And new generations have to start anew. They have to make the same mistakes over and over again (instead of building upon our knowledge) so that they can gain perspective (you cannot impose perspective on those who lack it).

It seems a cold, harsh thing, to be totally objective. But it isn't. The seeming coldness is just another illusion, one imposed on a lower and less-consciously-controllable level. The only way to get rid of all the "veils" in front of your eyes is to train yourself to "see clearly," and zazen (Zen meditation) is one way to achieve this. (There are other ways, such as Sufism and various other Eastern disciplines. I know of no analogous methods in the West.) But the point is that training is required. You cannot will yourself into objectivity (especially in difficult circumstances).

All material is copyright © 2005 fancybred and self_referent

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