Which Philosopher are you?

Humans, always think in 'small terms', still a fair way to go up the evolutionary tree, a few eons and things should even out

 

I always think in "small drams" myself.

 

Small terns. They have the answer.



-- Ian

 

Bravo fox

 

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1. Nietzsche (100%) Click here for info
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Should I be worried at this point?

 

I was kept busy with Faculty trifles and I could not answer. So, my move.

Spirit is to matter what movement is to body. It depends upon it inasmuch if the body is destroyed there will be no movement, but if it exists it is another state of matter. But surely you know this one: it is an old one (Gassendi, for instance) and not very persuasive. SO let's take it as a metaphor only.

Spirit is the Cogito. Let's take a few phrases or statements one is likely to have made or heard from others.

For instance, 'if my parents were never acquainted, who would I be?'

Or, better yet, 'I wish I was born an Athenian in the 5th Century'.

Or, better still, 'I wish I were never born'.

All this is equivalent to the seemingly universal concept of the immortality of the soul: ''when I am dead, were will I go?'

So we are affirming the existence of the I and its non existence, at the same time. With different kinds of statements, the absurdity of statement is only too obvious: 'Mary and John don't have children; how are they called?'

Only, when we say, in our darkest moments 'I wish I were never born' - I heard something very similar stated only a couple of weeks ago by a very despaired but highly intelligent girl - 'I wish I were another person' this doesn't look foolish.

Now I think we must draw a kind of Cartesian line here: we are really talking of two different 'I's here: the subject and the object. As Descartes perceives, the subject is a mere place of representation, lacking extension (in space and in time) and discernible structures or elements; whereas the object is our bodily and social I: what I do, my name, my titles, my job, my lineage, the kind of social groups to which I belong, my body, my age, and so forth.

But, of course, this object I is sure to die; and before birth it didn't exist. Because it is bounded, measurable, material and has extension and evolution in time and space.

But, and this is really important, the subject I lacks all those attributes. It is, as Descartes (himself a very matter-oriented mind) cleverly perceived, a representational void.

Naturally, the two feel disengaged to us: the subject I can contemplate the object I.

The object I is mostly matter and time and place bounded. The subject I is spirit and seems eternal. This is why every person is, at bottom, a dualist. Damasio's Descartes' Error is really Damásio's Error.

Your hand.

 

My own view is that the rational intellect is not the highest form of intelligence. What IS transcends (goes beyond) human understanding.

This being the case, it's pointless asking the questions.

My philosophy: Live until you die.

 

Too busy at work for a proper reply at the moment, but that distinction sounds like a grammatical one rather than an ontological one - if one defines the subject I in Cartesian terms, it is, by definition, a qualitatively different kind of stuff from the object I, but perhaps that's a feature of the language being used rather than of ontology? Defining subject and object in such a loaded way is rather assuming what needs to be proven. Our common-sense use of language may tell us that the subject I (ego, consciousness, spirit, whatever) is an interior, private, non-corporeal realm, and the object I is a public, embodied, temporal one, but our common-sense may be misleading about ontology. Dualists of all stripes have never been able to show that the distinction exists in any realm other than the grammatical. (Wittgenstein has good things to say about all this in his Philosophical Investigations.)

-- Ian

 

If something cannot be described (put into words) then how can we know we have experienced that "thing" and, further, categorise it (divine/ numinous etc)?

 

I should also probably quote Nietzsche at this point, since that's how this discussion started, and as it's a nicely provocative sentence:

"The awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body" (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

-- Ian

 

I wouldn't say it is only a grammatical distinction, because all cultures I have studied beleive in two sets of souls - one immortal (the subject ego) and the other mortal (the object ego) (there are more souls, but let's center on these two).

The distinction is, I think, phenomenological.

Nevertheless, in principle, I agree that one cannot trust phenomenology as a guide to ontology. Or can one?

The truth is, every culture theorizes about the soul (I mean the everlasting soul, not the life giving soul). OF course that does not mean the soul as such exists any more than God does (here I do believe we are faced with an universal illusion). But it does follow that there is a difference between what is felt as spiritual and what is not.

Does that mean that it is a universal illusion? You can take this position or say that in any case one only has access to the phenomenal (Berkeley, and even more forcefully, Hume). In which case what? Wittgenstaein's position that I know I have a mind but can't tell if you do? Or solipcism?

I am in favour of a distinction between matter and spirit in terms of phenomenology rather than ontology; but the ontological nature of phenomena does seem to exist... So... What?

Growing interesting... Or am I just too tired and talking rubbish... The last hypothesis seems a sound one right now!

 

Do you believe 'mind' to be a 'universal illusion'?

'Mind' seems to be a non-material entity that arises from the body-brain. Could 'God' be the 'Mind' of the Universe?

 

Hey, dear 7_V

I'm currently playing the idealist and Ian the materialist! You ask me if I am a materialist! I do have an answer to your question but let me anticipate only a little: I am a total, complete, and confirmed atheist.

But we do agree: mind seems to be a non material entity. But I don't really believe the Universe has a mind...

But really, one can think as one wishes because as Ian stated (following Wittgenstein) those matters can get exclusively semantic and one can give words the meaning one wants. More than that, even if I beleive that 'mind' is a product of the brain - and, as far as we know the Universe has no such analogous organ - I am not totally sure there is not an ontological difference.

So, there is hope

 

Dear Joel:

I don't think I agree with you. The numinous has been put into words by many people: Meister Eckhardt, San Juan de la Cruz and many others, and, more recently, in a superb book by Rudolph Otto: Das Heilige

But even if it had not, what you say comes too close to positivism to my liking: can you put the feeling of being passionately in love with somebody and having to leave her at the same time? I can do it with music. With words? I don't think so. Or take blind rage. You can describe the behaviour of someone acting that way. But if you ever experienced it, can you give a verbal account of it? Again I don't think so, but painture can.

And, since this is (also) a musical forum, most of the non-verbal arts are true arts precisely because they can clearly convey feelings one is unable to express through words. Try to describe the expression of a Franz Hals portrait to anyone who has never seen one (I'm thinking about La Courtisane right now). Or a Vermeer (the girl with the pearl, for instance). I've seen many people totally flabergasted standing before a really good painting (or sculpture) and saying, after that, something like «it just seemed like a dream - I can't express what I felt: it was just magic».

Once at ZeroGain you invited me - in jest - to abstract the thoughts of Wittgenstein (well, the Tratactus) in about 80 words. I will comply now, and I'll be even more economical (something unusual in me as your post in zerogain meant!):

He got it wrong. (I mean the first Wittgenstein)

 

I must confess that I don't know my Wittgensteins from my idealists or materialists and have no clue what an 'ontological difference' actually is. My philosophy is DIY, inspired by my practical experiences with meditation, Ki Aikido and the Feldenkrais Method.

Still, I'm not so sure that the Universe has no such analogous organ (as 'mind' is to brain and body).

After all, 'we' are each collections of organisms - we rely for example on foreign bacteria in our digestive systems that are really apart from ourselves but we could not survive without them. Presumably, it is this collective 'we' that gives rise to our 'minds'.

The 'Gaia' theory holds that the Earth - like us, a collection of apparently independent organisms - can be considered, like us, to be a single living organism. Does Gaia have a 'mind'? How would we know either way? Certainly if complexity is a contributory factor (as in "we have minds but snails or ameoba don't") then Gaia is complex enough to qualify.

The universe is a larger collection still. Is it living? Does it have mind and, if it does, should we call it God? Well, what's in a name?

You see RdS, I am obsessed with the creative process and with the similarities between evolution and engineering. It is difficult for me to conceive that our creativity, which is born of the universe, is alone in the universe.

Well I'll apologize for my amateur ramblings, get back to me speakers and leave philosophy to you guys who sound like you know what you're talking about.

 

here is my result, not what I expected

Your Results:


1. Jean-Paul Sartre (100%) Click here for info
2. Jeremy Bentham (97%) Click here for info
3. Aristotle (92%) Click here for info
4. Aquinas (92%) Click here for info
5. Ayn Rand (85%) Click here for info
6. Nietzsche (85%) Click here for info
7. Kant (85%) Click here for info
8. John Stuart Mill (81%) Click here for info
9. Spinoza (79%) Click here for info
10. Prescriptivism (75%) Click here for info
11. Stoics (71%) Click here for info
12. Epicureans (70%) Click here for info
13. David Hume (63%) Click here for info
14. Thomas Hobbes (63%) Click here for info
15. Ockham (58%) Click here for info
16. Plato (55%) Click here for info
17. St. Augustine (55%) Click here for info
18. Cynics (42%) Click here for info
19. Nel Noddings (40%) Click here for info

 

It may not be purely grammatical, but the distinction is generally expressed in a way which could easily be a trick of language rather than anything else (the fact that all languages have a concept of the spirit may be indicative of something, but, then again, we have no particularly compelling arguments to think it is). Wittgenstein's point is, of course, that ultimately all "important" philosophical questions are grammatical misunderstandings, he may be overstating the case but that seems to me a reasonable summary of virtually all academic philosophy.

On one level (the commonsensical, not such a bad level after all), this must be true I suppose.

No, one can't (IMO), which is why phenomenology only gets you so far (not very far at all, sadly). Don't want to turn this into a debate solely about Wittgenstein, but I like his beetle in a box analogy.

Spirit, geist, consciousness, ego, whatever one wishes to call it, is embodied. We are physical beings after all. Oftentimes our physicality is a hindrance to us (as we get older, we wake up feeling pain; how annoying!), and we tend to take refuge in the mind (hence nostalgia for our earlier lives). Perhaps an evolutionary impulse enforces our feeling that our spirit is something disembodied, separate from our physical manifestation, in order to minimise the trauma of our knowledge of mortality. We can live with the knowledge of our certain death if we make a sharp distinction between mind and body. From that evolutionary impulse we construct philosophical and religious constructs which make it possible to live in the world, by giving us hope that our existence has a purpose, and perhaps doesn't really end.

-- Ian

 

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

We should all act with our own interests as the ultimate goal of our actions.
We have free will.
Moral standards are objective, and can be known rationally.


Sounds about right!