Monthly Archives: December 2016

Truth

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There’s been a lot of news, lately, about the dissemination of ‘fake news’. Almost daily, it seems, there are reports of ersatz information being spread around, some of which is pretty incredible. Sometimes it’s reported, people will even take actions in response to these ‘fake news’ stories, which, I guess, must mean they can sometimes be pretty believable.

But now I learn that a pretty large percentage of the population distrusts news sources altogether, which makes me wonder, if the news sources are of dubious believability how do we determine what’s fake? And, if we can’t tell what’s fake how can we know what’s true? I guess truth becomes a matter of belief, which works pretty well, I suppose, when it comes to religious issues but maybe not so much when it involves hard facts.

As far as I’m concerned I’ve got this kind of intuitive scenario in my mind that I sort of fit new information in to, selecting and discarding as it suits my world view. My understanding of things may not always be entirely accurate but my method does give me temporary peace of mind.

santa shrine 3

 

Will-less Peace

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I’ve been thinking about the will lately, you know, that primal existential drive from which all of our desires, hungers, urges along with the accompanying passions originate. The Will is the very life-force that defines who we are beyond our physical existences in space and time; we are our will. Unfortunately, my will has been imposing extremely negative emotions on me lately: disgust and abstract hatred mostly. I think it may have something to do with current political occurrences.

So, I think it would be good, sometimes, to be able to transcend the insidious demands of my will. I do, of course, appreciate the occasional euphoric satisfaction, but what I get mostly are anxieties and disappointments. And, the way to do that (transcend the will, that is), I’m confidently reassured by that great thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, is to seek beauty. Not the kind of visual attractiveness that only feeds self-interests, but pure ideal beauty, or if that can’t be done then perhaps descent into the overwhelming awe of the sublime will suffice.

At any rate, I’m focusing on reaching beyond my willful self-interests by seeking the purity of the beautiful, visual or aural, perhaps both. I’ll keep the will at arm’s length, at least for a while; I’ll bask in the truth of the Ideal, the beauty within that transcends the physical here and now. It seems to me, as I think about it, that this is what religions should be about.

meditationdevice18

 

Philosophy for All

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I came across a commentary, recently, suggesting it might not be such a good idea to introduce thoughts philosophical to young people. I guess the thinking was that young minds were not developed enough to handle deep thought, which made me wonder what the commentator thought philosophy is. Philosophy, it seems to me, is, to a great extent, about reflection: thoughts about relative moral values, how best to deal with difficult situations, maybe thoughts about what might underlie our daily existence.

While children may be less inclined toward thoughtfulness, they are certainly intellectually savvy, dealing, as they do, with the rough and tumble world of the playground. What they do have is a general openness to alternatives, particularly when it comes to human relations. Provided a forum for reflection, I suspect most will reach an attitude of tolerance for the other.

So, in my opinion, given these terribly divisive times, I think philosophical thinking should be encouraged in the schools. I have this feeling that, given the opportunity, children could reach out to our hardened unswayable opinionated psyches and teach us all philosophical perspectives on tolerance and mutual respect.

greek philosophers

The World as Idea

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I’ve been thinking, lately, about ideas certain philosophers, back in the day, spent quite a bit of time thinking about, which is, what exactly we can know of the world we inhabit. Generally, there seemed to have been the assumption that there is way more to the universe than we can ever know given our limited sensory capacity and intellect.

The thinking goes that while experiencing the world is one thing (shared by all animal life), perceptive understanding is limited and can only occur through our innate, implanted cognitive facility to organize phenomena in terms of space, time, cause and effect: that to know a thing is to visualize it in three-dimensional space and to understand it as being in the present, having some sort of past and likely future, what cause brought it about and effect it may eventually have.

Which is why, some of the old guys determined the only world I can know is nothing more than an idea, but, underlying my idea of the world lays an unknowable, substantive reality, world-in-itself, existing within the realm of the metaphysical.

But maybe science is making some headway. This whole other unknowable realm underlying our sensory and intellectual capacities seems likely to me to probably have something to do with sub-atomic particle physics, you know, quarks and things so small nobody’s actually seen them, which make up all that the universe is, and the meta- can probably be left off of the metaphysical, at least with regard to the idea of world.

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