Philosophy

[Bombadillo]

John Locke is my favorite character. Anyway though, he really is. I assumed the creators of Lost picked that name deliberately, but now I don't really think he's similar to the real Locke. I digress.

I reread most of this thread just now and realized that there were lots of posts I meant to reply to! IDK why I didn't.

First of all, sorry for leaving you hanging, Rian.

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

and Bomb, could you please elaborate on your beauty statement?

What I said was: "Beauty is appreciation." That was to summarize an idea that I remember trying to verbalize, but no matter how I phrased it, it was too ambigious, so I tried an anecdote instead. Since it was part of a discussion on art and beauty, that anecdote emphasized that they are not the same, but that beauty cannot exist without art.

Someone proposed that beauty is inherent in everything, just waiting to be noticed by someone with just the right mindset to notice it. I disagree. I think that art is inherent in everything. To sumarize my views on art: Art is the potential to be interpreted as allegorical.

For example, I remember being very little, squatting in my backyard, holding a soft, bright green leaf that had somehow fallen from a tree despite its impressive health. I was admiring its flawlessness, and very glad to be able to examine it so closely without having it disintegrate in my hands like a dead leaf would. I never really noticed all those veins before, nor had I noticed that if you put the leaf between your eye and the sun, you could sort of see through it and see all the little veins that form patterns inside and don't even affect the surface. Then I started to think, "This leaf is just like life. These veins are just like all the turns we can take in our life, major, minor, good, or bad. These little boxes inside are just like all the different areas of life that we carry with us in memory. So different, and yet all parts of one leaf, that in people, make us unique."

BTW I swear I'm not making this one up. There would be no reason for that. I know it doesn't make sense that I remember this so vividly or that I would be thinking like this as a six-year old kid, but the important thing is that it seems poetic doesn't it? Because that leaf represented something to me that was more than just a literal leaf. It was art. It would have been art whether I noticed it or not, but, lucky for the both of us, I did notice it, and I found it beautiful. That's what I mean. Things are beautiful when someone recognizes the art in them.

The most similar famous philosophical statement that I'm familiar with would be that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (Anybody know who said that?) I guess I agree with that, but I wanted to be more specific.

[Bombadillo]

Originally Posted by Lief Erikson

Bombadillo, in trying to define meaning, here are some of the words that immediately come to my mind. Purpose. Relevance. Impact. Importance.

I can't see how meaninglessness fulfills any of these. Impact is the only one a non-believer can hope for, and even then it is only hope.

Impact is what I hope for. Everything in life suggests to me that life is haphazard, which is why I don't believe in a god. Religious people too often attribute the inevitable changes and cycles of life to something higher and mysterious, IMO. But I also think that while I'm alive, I might as well make other people's lives easier on them in whatever little way possible. (Of course I'd prefer to leave a big impact on everyone's life, but I have to work within the confines of reality.) To me, if there is a purpose in life, which I doubt but don't care to speculate on anymore, this is it: improving the lives of others.

What are you insinuating? That you think leaving a positive impact on the world is probably not what we should be doing with our lives, because there is something better? ( I'm not attacking you, because I don't know yet. But if so we'll probably argue until one of us dies.) What do you "hope for"?

[Lotesse]

Ciao, Bombadillo, I just wanted to say before I forget, that was an awesome post. I understand in a visceral sense what it is you're trying to explain, and I'd elaborate but right now I'm at my boyfriend's office computer and it is way too slow, plus I'm drinking beer, and am also otherwise distracted, but I just wanted to say awesome post about the nature of beauty and art, and the age old question "what is art," and beauty being in the beholder's eye and everything. Wasn't that a line from a Shakespeare play?

I picked John Locke to re-bump this thread with because I love his philosophy and that randomly happened to be who popped into my head this morning when I was trying to think of something, anything to jumpstart the thread with, but to tell you guys the truth, I think a discussion about what is art, and the nature of true beauty, is a much, much more interesting and fun place to re-jump from. Thanks, Bombadillo! Now, if only brownjenkins, The Gaffer, Hasty Ent, sun-star, Shah, Earniel, Nurvingiel, Beard of Pants, etcetera etcetera - and many, many more will pounce upon this interesting possible philosophical talk, we could have a wonderful time! As long as we keep religion out of it. There's dozens, literally dozens of threads with a religious theme; I think it's so great to keep at least one secular philosophy or non-religious philosophy thread open.
That being said, I go drink my beer now.

This computer is way, way too slow, man.

[Lief Erikson]

Responding I am!

[Lotesse]

Lief, you think we can keep it secular here? Can I ask you, please, please, to keep the religion out of this thread, as much as is humanly possible? Please, please, try to curtail your urge to turn the conversation to God or gods or being a christian; can you do that for us? There's all kinds, all kinds of threads you could discuss away about god and religion in; if you type in Philosophy in the search function it'll pull up all sorts of juicy religion-themed threads, like Religion and Individualism, stuff like that. I'm on my knees here, begging.

[Lief Erikson]

Okay, Lotesse! I'm responding in the Religion forum.

[Bombadillo]

Lotesse, your dinosaur comics (easily one of the best sites I've ever seen BTW, and seriously, thanks for introducing me to it) really struck a nerve with me. The one about nihilism in particular.

(The rest of this post is an unnecessarily long and perhaps melodramatic story about myself that only touches upon philosophy superficially. You don't even have to read it if you'd rather just continue the discussion. At least I warned you frankly. )

I'm in high school, another name for the hell that is a building full of three thousand kids with minor identity crises and highly exaggerated psychological issues. Every one of them but me has a MySpace, and almost every one of their pages if totally filled with poems about their peerless torture and nihilistic existence. Now I find that pretty funny, how they profess to be irreprably emotionally scarred and completely devoid of emotion at the same time, but I can't blame them; it's just so cool to have everyone think you're insane nowadays, I don't know why I try so hard to be rational, and nihilism is such a cool word, I don't know why I don't throw it around more often.

So I obviously can't even talk about people like this without getting worked up. The problem was that when I first encounted the word "nihilistic," I didn't know what it meant, but it was in their writing. I associated it with them, and of figured it meant something along the same lines as woe, clamity, dark essense, the sort of things that the rest of their poetry deals with. So when I looked up its definition I was totally taken aback. That's me. I'm a nihilist. Maybe not, because I'm sentimental in some ways, but then again who isn't? There's probably no such thing as a true nihilist. Out of all the people I've ever encountered, I am, no contest, by far, the most nihilistic. I realized this, and I felt horrible, like garbage, for being able to identify with these people.

So for like a month I was shocked. I kept thinking about it. But ultimately I accepted that yeah, I am the most nihilistic, but why do people associate this with something bad? The only reason these goth-wannabe wimps claim to be nihilistic is because they think it makes them seem willingly disconnected from society when in fact they're still eagerly searching for a place, I concluded. But you can be nihilistic without being a grouch. So life has no meaning, probably. That's no excuse to just piss and moan to no end. Do good stuff to no end. It's better.

I guess what I'm trying to demonstrate is that people associate nihilism with negativity. I myself am often mistaken for being antisocial or insensitive for things I say/do in attempts to dispell people's anxiety over silly little things. I'm just curious as to what people think about nihilism, and what sort of person they picture when they picture a nihilist. Anyone?

EDIT: CRAZY CROSS-POST!!!! ^ That took me 45 minutes to compose!

[Lotesse]

The following taken from this link; you guys can read the rest of the definition here - http://www.iep.utm.edu/n/nihilism.htm

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. While few philosophers would claim to be nihilists, nihilism is most often associated with Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that its corrosive effects would eventually destroy all moral, religious, and metaphysical convictions and precipitate the greatest crisis in human history. In the 20th century, nihilistic themes--epistemological failure, value destruction, and cosmic purposelessness--have preoccupied artists, social critics, and philosophers. Mid-century, for example, the existentialists helped popularize tenets of nihilism in their attempts to blunt its destructive potential. By the end of the century, existential despair as a response to nihilism gave way to an attitude of indifference, often associated with antifoundationalism.


I think it's true, what Bombadillo says, in that there's really no such thing as a true nihilist.

[Rían]

I think nihilists are the only atheists with balls.

[Bombadillo]

That settles it then. Tomorrow I'm buying Nietzsche for Dummies.

Rian, thanks for the compliment? LMAO!

[Rían]

Originally Posted by Bombadillo

That settles it then. Tomorrow I'm buying Nietzsche for Dummies.

ROTFL!!!!

[Lotesse]

Beyond Good and Evil is really good.

[Bombadillo]

Yeah, but I also hear that it's a very difficult read... One day...

[Lotesse]

It's not!! It's not difficult to read, not at all! And it isn't a big book, either. You shouild check it out, just to check it out - I mean that, literally. Like, go to the library, and check it out, and skim through it & check it out.


Here's the beginning of Part Two, The Free Spirit:

Originally Posted by Nietsche

O sancta simplicitas! Human beings live in such a peculiarly simple and counterfeit way! Once a man develops eyes to see this wonder, he can't check his amazement! How bright and free and light and simple we have made everything around us! How we have learned to give our senses free license for everything superficial, our thinking a divine craving for wanton leaps and erroneous conclusions! How we have learned ways, right from the start, to maintain our ignorance in order to enjoy a hardly conceivable freedom, safety, carelessness, heartiness, the merriment of life—in order to enjoy life.

And only on this firm granite foundation of ignorance could scientific knowledge up to now rise up, the will to know on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, to uncertainty, to what is not true! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement! For if language, here as elsewhere, does not cast off its clumsiness and continues to speak about opposites, where there are only degrees and various stages of refinement, and similarly if inveterate hypocrisy in morality, which nowadays belongs to our invincible "flesh and blood," turns the words even of us knowledgeable people around in our mouths, here and there we understand that and laugh about how it's precisely the best scientific knowledge that most wants to hold us in this simplified, completely artificial, appropriately created, and appropriately falsified world, how it loves error, voluntarily and involuntarily, because, as something alive, it loves life.

[Spock]

und morgen die Welt!

[brownjenkins]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

I think nihilists are the only atheists with balls.

It's easy to think in absolutes, dealing with reality takes much more testicular fortitude.

[Rían]

Reality isn't necessarily always difficult. If something is easy, it doesn't automatically mean it's not true.


"testicular fortitude" - LOL!

ps - I don't think you need that book, Bomb!

Originally Posted by Lotesse

"Originally Posted by Nietsche"

hee hee! That's cute!
*imagines Nietsche on Entmoot*
Reminds me of Monty Python's "Philosophers' Soccer Game"

[Lief Erikson]

Crude language, RÃ*an! (Slaps her wrist) No more, thanks .

[Rían]

Yes, but I think it's an important point, and sometimes strong language puts the point across better. So on occasion, I'll use it.

EDIT - Lotesse, what does that quote mean to you, in your own words?

[Falagar]

Originally Posted by RÃ*an

Reality isn't necessarily always difficult. If something is easy, it doesn't automatically mean it's not true.

Reality isn't necessary difficult, humans are. Unfortunately for reality, humans make up a big part of it on earth right now.