Philosophers

Maybe *you* can't know things. I don't know why you can't know. But I bet I could figure it out, lmao

I'm curious: did you trick me on purpose or did you mean every word?

Gee. I actually did miss that (initially). Then I picked up on it and giggled.

 

Speaking of teapots, isn't it time for the Mad Hatter to arrive. Or is he here already?

 

That's a Biblical character, right?

(Mad Hatter does not exist)

 

Haha I'm not even sure myself. :daisy:

 

Maybe his watch is slow.

 

:groupwave:

 

You didn't need to mention that this teapot was on the earth because you said at the outset that your imagining it didn't make it so, but something did.
I don't get the Russel reference but would like to. Where do teapots exist besides earth?
What does being circumspect have to do with conditioning?

What makes it so for you is acknowledging the relationships, a cognition you call your own or recognition. There is no truth you can recognize true or not unless it has your agreement. Knowledge is being shared.

 

I believe she was more troubled by his many other lovers, than his senility. Though I do think that your conclusion that, ‘such is the fate,’ is a bit reductionist.

You guys are still misunderstanding me. It is true that nihilism is a choice, but being born into the Age of Nihilism is not. And yes there is a huge difference between not knowing morals, values, or truth, and dismissing them.

But does the Age of Nihilism have to mean that everyone is a nihilist? Consider this, for example, does a Christian community mean that everyone in that community is a Christian, or is it possible that within that community there might be a few Jewish people, a few agnostics, and even a few Buddhists? Perhaps an atheist works at the Bookstore?

I would argue that in the Age of Nihilism, not everyone is actually a nihilist. For example, I stated that this is the Age of Nihilism, but in that same post, I hope I clarified that I am not a nihilist. However I will argue that morals, and ethics are existential---that they are not universals, but products of human understanding. Nonetheless, I am an essentialist----believing that essence is the source of being, not existence, and therefore I do believe that there is a deeper truth that transcends physical existence, and therefore value does as well.

When we are talking of the Age of Nihilism, we are not, in my opinion, referring directly to people’s stated beliefs and philosophies. Instead, we are speaking towards what Hegel called, the zeitgeist, or, the spirit of the times. While the zeitgeist is a reflection of people’s beliefs—I would argue that it is more than anything else, the philosophy of the collective unconscious. As a collective, this refers more to an objective reality. Individual beliefs are a subjective reality. (By the way, I do believe that objectivism has reached its apex---that the group ethic born out of our ancient planter-culture ancestors has seen its day---and now we are at a stage of renewed subjectivism—the rise of the individual, perhaps this is the enlightenment that you referred to bird_migration. This may not necessarily be the individualism of the industrial age---the self-centered greed-driven elitist, who only becomes a true individual once he has ‘made it,’ while everyone who has not ‘made it’ has failed and is eventually discarded as a broken part, like metal filings fallen through the cracks to the bottom casing of the machine. Rather it is the pre-planter culture individualism of the hunter-gatherer, an individualism where one is free to be who he is (think of the individualism of the hippy).)

Why would it seem that so many people are religious or what have you, yet the collective unconscious is largely nihilistic? Because more than at any other time in mankind’s history, today we are faced with a deeper level of alienation of man from his subconscious. Here again it boils down to an objectivistic reality—a focus on conscious, which is also physical, reality. The world around us, and outside of us, is far more important than the world within us. Yet it is the world within us, the subconscious mind, that harbors that aspect of our true selves that we consciously deny. I am referring to the shadow, and I believe that Modern Man has an overly inflated ego-shadow complex.

I am going to give you an example, and if that example, offends you, or makes you angry, then I am touching an element within your own shadow. Remember, I am not referring to the validity of Christianity, or whether it is ‘right.’ But we all know that overzealous Christian that passionately tries to convert anyone and everyone, and works so hard to make sure the world around him or her is modeled after the Christian values that are so passionately dear to this person. There is passion that derives from a rich and deep spiritual experience, but there is quite another type of passion that derives from an aspect of the psyche that induces a hidden and usually unknown fear. More often than not it is the latter version that drives overzealous passions. What makes this person so overzealous is the fact that they have doubts within their own beliefs, but they have repressed these into their shadow, and are therefore, 1.) unknowingly continuously trying to convince themselves that they do believe, and are 2.) unknowingly trying to create a reality on the outside (an objective reality) to make up for, and to blot out, what the ego secretly senses, or secretly fears, is an internal reality.

Here I am talking about the overzealous Christian, but it plays out in all sorts of ways in Modern society. In this way, one does not have to choose to be a nihilist. As you said, bird_migration, there is a difference between not knowing ethical or moral values, and those who choose (using Okie’s words) dismissing them. A nihilist is someone who has taken, or come to the conclusion of a philosophical position. Someone who truly does not know right from wrong, or truth, is a naïve soul who would not be troubled much over issues that induce guilt in others. Another type would be a psychopath, an individual who psychological has a diminished conscience. I would consider both of the latter cases to be relatively rare. On the other hand, our culture is filled with people who go through life repressing doubts, fears, questions, and who therefore live their lives trying to fill it with meaning, all the while secretly afraid to face those doubts and questions, and the lack of true meaning within their own lives.

Why this is the Age of Nihilism is because we have lost that force that keeps cultures alive—a unifying truth. There is no culture wide understanding that provides meaning in our lives. Therefore most people today are faced with the strong need to repress such fears and issues of value and meaning into their shadows, and create an ego-ideal that, yes, I am somebody, or I do believe, or I do not need to believe—even ego-ideals that profess, yes there is a god, or no, there is no god (after all both positions imply a very real and very subjective risk, and one that is often pushed upon us by those who live around us, and their individual beliefs, forcing our egos to respond). These fears and doubts fester in individuals whether they realize it or not, but even more so at the level of the collective unconscious.

Consumerism thrives on the exploitation of this, as it very successfully masks over the problem. In fact, you could say that today it is consumerism, and the drive for short term pleasure that is our modern unifying truth—for that is what drives the Modern economy. In this way you could also refer to the Modern Age as the Age of Addiction. Almost everyone is addicted to something, often times many things. To far too many people it is drugs or alcohol. But there are people addicted to texting, to TV, to books, to PlayStation, to Facebook and Hipforums… These addictions largely arise because we are masking over these fears and doubts. As Pink Floyd sang in The Wall, I forget the song, but, “to fill the empty spaces.” It is one thing to often do something you enjoy, but it is quite another thing to not be able to stop.

For most people today, their lives are lived in a world of non-stop abstraction. For example, you may not realize it, but I am an Ace fighter pilot. I have shot down quite a few enemy planes in a wide variety of jet fighters. The problem is if I ever sat in an actual fighter plane I would probably stall out on takeoff and crash. But Ace Combat is one of the games on my son’s PlayStation that I, an old fart, can be pretty good at. But we are at a level where even today’s wars are fought at an abstract level—a pilot is able to sit in a comfortable air conditioned room on the other side of the world, sipping a Coke, while controlling a fast moving bomb that can kill his target and numerous nearby innocent men, women, and children, almost without warning. Our objective perspective of life is increasingly abstract, which in terms of physical reality, is increasing false. What deeper values can you find in a false reality?

But this modern day nihilism is also a question of the integrity or shallowness of the values that Modern culture has embraced. What deeper truth can we find, for example, in the materialist aspects of Objectivism—that there is nothing more than physical existence? It boils down, no matter how much satisfaction you try to create in it, to a nihilistic conclusion.

The fall of both the Roman and Greek Civilizations demonstrate to us how embracing the cold and dead values of objectivism and rationalism served as nails in their coffins—especially as they manifested themselves in what Nietzsche called the Apollonian dynamic. This was a dynamic of repressive and oppressive control—manipulative and addicted to order, the opposite of the other social dynamic—the vibrant, explosive, drunken, but very natural Dionysian dynamic. The forms pushes down on subjectivism, the latter gives life to it. The same thing happened in China, with the rise of Confucianism. The fall of communism is another example, and in Nietzsche’s time this very same thing happened with the fall of the traditional European Bourgeoisie culture. In America, I would argue that it was the hippies that saved us from the rise of the Apollonian dynamic in the fifties, as they carried forward the legacy of the Beats. But today we once again are witnessing the rise of the Apollonian dynamic.

This cultural embracing of shallow and dead values, was outwardly manifested as decadence. The simple-minded decadence of the Junkers was everywhere evident to Nietzsche. Today we have the Culture of Greed in Washington—as well as other signs of cultural decadence. Even religion has plenty of examples of decadence---one of the most blatant being that of tele-evangelism. It is not hard there to see where decadent and false values have replaced true value. (Yes, I did state that morals and ethics are not universals but human values, but we are after all humans, and are subject to the physical world of humans—existential existence.) Look at the trilogy, The Hunger Games, which makes use of modernized motifs of long ago cultures at the dawn of their own decay—particularly that of the Romans. But it is a story of objectivist rationalism and a level of Decadence that makes one think of 18th Century France (but right wing politics today is professing the same ideals that lead to such blatant levels of decadence).

The Age of Nihilism is not outwardly a dark gothic age of impending doom. But it is an age of people struggling to find meaning, where little meaning exists---even if most people do not realize this. It also does not mean that there is no meaning. Spiritually there is very deep meaning that can be found—deep profound experience that can enrich and provide bits, if not more, of true meaning and value. Instead, the Age of Nihilism is one of a culture that has lost meaning, and therefore covertly thrusts that cultural reality into the lives of everyone. Popular culture, the arts, and the other manifestations of dreams from the collective unconscious have been demonstrating this for many years.

Okiefreak, you say that Post-Modern theorists have it wrong. But one of the key issues of Post-Modern theory is that we no longer have a Unifying Truth. Before the enlightenment, and for a long time after it, the Church provided Western culture with this unifying truth. But what cultural unifying truth is their today? (Not to mention the fact that modern globalism presents a culture that could not rely on any one religion anyway). What philosophical force (which in Kantian terms I use to include spiritual or religious forces) is their that today’s culture accepts as truth, and thereby provides meaning to the lives of everyone, and a sense of unity to everyone and their culture?

Bird_migration, you suggested that we are moving towards the Age of Nihilism. You can certainly make a sound argument for that. I could likewise make an argument that the Age of Nihilism began with the DaDa artists. But truth be told, I think that, for example, the Church still had a strong hold on Western Culture even into the 1950’s and 60’s. Science was clearly still the new unifying truth at that time too. I think the problem there is simply one of semantics.

However, I do believe we are moving towards a new Enlightenment. I do not see Post-Modernism as a new way of life, or a new culture, as many Post-Modern theorists do, rather I see it as a crisis---a transition point, as we move into a new level of human development---a new revolution much like the Industrial Revolution, only this one will be to resolve the chasm between mind and body created by Kant (which served the purposes of bringing us to this point of modernization).

Also, as I implied earlier, the hippies were the first to react to this fall into nihilism----they were the first of Nietzsche’s supermen. They were the rise of the Dionysian that saved us from the rising objectivism of the 1950’s.

 

Mountain Valley Wolf, I think we are not that far apart, I agree with you on many points. But we may have reached different conclusions, or have different perceptions.
I, too, believe that we are moving towards a new Enlightenment and I think nihilism could well be the catalysator for this.
As I see it, we are at the very beginning of a new era and before this Enlightenment can be reached, the balance needs to be tipped a lot more in favor of nihilism. This could take decades or more.

I certainly agree that not everyone has to be a nihilist to enter the Age of Nihilism, but I think right now the world isn't tipped over to that, maybe the Western world is, but not the whole world. The vast majority of people live by certain morals and truths and survive rather than consume. Which I don't value good or bad, I just observe. We might be in some early stages of the Age of Consumerism, or as you said, Age of Addiction, which I probably like even better.
Consumerism/addiction eventually leads to feelings of emptiness, which lead to nihilism. Not necessarily the other way round.

Is nihilism bad?
Not per se, since it might give us a new Enlightenment, which gives us a renewed passion for arts, science, individuality etc. It might be necessary even for humanity as a whole to make a next leap towards new universal insights and perhaps even knowledge about our existence.

Personally, I even think nihilism could give us many things, but as you said, people generally do need a unifying truth and nihilism could not give that the way it is perceived now.

 

There is again a difference between grandiosity and grandeur. Life is not post anything and it's success is ancient. It owes it's success to making many copies of which a few bear fruit. I think philosophers make an error when they consider man to be an ideal expression somehow transcendent of this dynamic. That is a wholesale awakening is not probable.

 

I believe in Kali Yuga.

And it seems to me that "age of nihilism" and Kali Yuga are the same thing.

The Yuga Cycle doctrine tells us that we are now living in the Kali Yuga; the age of darkness, when moral virtue and mental capabilities reach their lowest point in the cycle.

 

Perhaps you are responding to my mistake---a bad choice of words to speak of the Post-Modern as a new way of life---a new stage would have been better.

Post refers to a later period in a linear progression of stages. Human culture has gone through different stages. For example, Western culture is no longer manifested as a planter culture. Western culture is also no longer manifested in a feudal system. Russia continues to struggle as a Post-Soviet State. The term post is merely a way of categorizing one stage in reference to another.

Wholesale awakening does not occur in the sense that suddenly everyone understands something----rather it evolves----just like the transition into the Industrial Age.

 

I think I understand how you demark these things. I disagree with the idea of linear progression in evolution. The evidence is that life is redundant, that is rising and falling in waves. We have proliferation in novel environments then specialization then extinction as special circumstances change and as life is ever rolling the dice anew. Life does over time move from the simple to the more complex, from few connections to many connections. More complex is not higher but it is richer in relationships which makes for greater adaptability.
We see a simple expression of this principle in the schooling, flocking and territorial behaviors of animals. Knowing the territory, an expansive area of relations, or being in a group provides many avenues of escape and greater opportunity of finding sustenance with the increased acuity of familiarity or many eyes and ears.

Fundamentally I don't see where the proprietary or feudal system has been replaced by the industrial age but rather I see the same system seeming less brute by virtue of mesmerizing technology. This technological ingenuity is ingenuous, that is artless in comparison to the spark of life that dreams these things up.

 

I think we can safely leave this at the level of personal belief. You don't know the time of day or night without a watch and we tend to see what we watch for. Energy is neither high nor low. Here is not a discrete location being everywhere at once nor now an isolated event being everywhere present.

 

I think you can dismiss me all you want (basis of personal dislike), but that won't take away from the irrefutable point I made about "age of nihilism" and Kali Yuga.

Did you bother to read Kali Yuga? If so, did you understand it or not?

Put it this way: if you don't "believe" Kali Yuga, which other do you think it is?

The following values are provided in the Sanskrit texts for the duration of the Yugas and their respective dawns and twilights.

• Satya Yuga (Golden Age): 4000 years + 400 years dawn + 400 years twilight = 4800 years
• Treta Yuga (Silver Age): 3000 years + 300 years dawn + 300 years twilight = 3600 years
• Dwapara Yuga (Bronze Age): 2000 years + 200 years dawn + 200 years twilight = 2400 years
• Kali Yuga (Iron Age): 1000 years + 100 years dawn + 100 years twilight = 1200 years

Maybe *you* don't know the time of day or night without a watch. I, like it or not (and like or dislike me for saying it), have a quirky eccentricity of being able to know exactly what time it is without needing a watch! An amusing phenomenon I've experienced all throughout my life. But this thread isn't about me .. I just don't want to let a non-truth hang in the air.

 

ginalee14 You may certainly have something there. I believe that spiritual teachings--and prophecies in particular--come to us in the language of the subconscious (just as dreams do). They represent spiritual truths that are true in the reality of other dimensions----therefore they do not play out the same way in the physical world as we expect them to. They may be more symbolic in a physical sense, or refer to something we do not expect, or they may manifest in a slightly different manner.

But the transition into Kali Yuga has played out in an interesting way, and fits with all kinds of other traditions of change. There is no denying that we are destroying the earth, and impacting it in ways that no other living creature ever has. Human population exploded only a little over a century ago---began exploding is a better way to say it. It was accompanied by the invention of manure---which is dependent on the very resources we are rapidly using up---oil and coal. The earth's soil can only produce crops to the limit of the Nitrogen content of the soil. Fertilizer raises that Nitrogen content and therefore has been responsible for producing enough food to feed larger populations---enabling that explosive population growth.

There are all kinds of coincidences that point to the value of such prophecies----Cortez arriving in the America's, for example, just as the Aztec, and Mayan calendars shifted, and subsequently being mistaken for Quetzalcoatl. Questzalcoatl however can appear as his twin brother, who brings blood sacrifice and other terrible things.

(Oh no---there I go talking gloom and doom again...) But seriously, you are on to something there.

Thedope, I do agree with you in a sense. For example, the linear concept assumes, for example, that primitive peoples are---primitive. Only very recently has anthropologists come to terms with the fact that, primitive people are very complex and advanced, it is just that they are working with different parameters than we do---they have an entirely different truth that shapes their reality (----oh oh there's that Unifying Truth again).

I have written elsewhere about how my good friend Kari Black Elk (Great Grandson of Black Elk, and Grandson of Wallace Black Elk) and I will sit up all night discussing quantum physics, getting very deep on the subject, however he speaks from an entirely different animistic perspective, has only a High School education and no training in the subject. But you would amazed at what he has to say. Albert Einstein said of his grandfather, "He is the only real teacher I ever knew."

So I do agree with you in a sense. On the other hand I also agree with Hegel's Historicism---but only up to a point. Historicism is a linear model of history, but it holds that overall we are moving towards a utopian world. I feel that Utopianism is nothing more than an ideal. Each solution brings its own problems. For example we were faced with a growing and very serious pollution problem before the wholesale introduction of the automobile, that was stunting the growth of big cities---the problem of Horse manure.

But I do believe that each stage of man's development has served its purpose---which is a point of historicism. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between these two perspectives.

But you can still use the term post in your perspective---if we move in a wave-like pattern, you can be post-crest of the wave, you can be post-valley or post-bottom of the wave. Like ginalee14 said, it is like using a watch to tell time. It can be afternoon, for example, and the next day there is another afternoon. Here again, I think you are making a problem of semantics.

 

I think reality is the same for all of us. Parameters are symbolic modelings. The unifying truth is vibration and luminosity in relation.

I have no training on the subject of philosophy and I didn't finish high school.
I am not separate from my source.

Which seems to me an extension of a utopian ideal. You could say that every living moment is a success unless you have been grandiose about your chances.

I don't see how semantics is a problem being the study of meaning. I have a different perspective on the wave. We breath in and we breath out and each breath is a completely new vitality. Inhalation and exhalation equals one breath and it is the space between that appears as history as we take a breath and observe the sensation that follows. The wave collapses in the historic view as you see only the past and imagine a future. The wave is not linear but concentric. Things will not be different tomorrow as things are always as they are here and now. History is always told in the present.



As to what time it is. What we call time is how we organize ourselves based on current memory. When I say you don't know what time it is ginallee14 I mean real time it is not dependent on your accounting.
As to kali yuga the divisions of time are too brief to be meaningful to the age of anything.

 

I didn't dismiss you and I like you just fine. It is an irrefutable point that this is what you profess to believe but it is not common knowledge but specialized conception. Just to clear the air.

I understand the hierarchical interpretation. Low and high are two dimensional view not a whole understanding.

 

So, "age of nihilism" isn't boxed as a "belief" but Kali Yuga (Iron Age) is?

You're boxing Iron Age (Kali Yuga) as *ginalee14's PERSONAL* "belief" .. in order to dismiss it.

I'm ASKING: is that because it's Hindu (religion)?

It's okay to talk about one AGE but not another, and the reason you don't want to allow Kali Yuga into a discussion of AGES is because .. it's a "belief"? Give me a break.

"age of nihilism" then, is a BELIEF (which can be dismissed, just like Iron Age).

Unreal.

 

In regards to population growth, in Hindu:

"the beginning of the end of the Universe is when the 10th gate is open".

The 10th gate is the cervix.