I like 'the labyrinth of my vanity'. For that's precisely what it is, isn't it? We need to build cathedrals to something else. Something more important than ourselves. Then, when somebody attempts to deny or destroy it, we can appeal to something other than wounded self-love.
To the self-sacrificial, that is, the highest ethical achievement. Yet perfect asceticism won't suffice, were it even possible, because every species of life, including vegetative, equally deserves a mercifully induced final sleep. Lucretius smartly assures us that where we are is no construction of any lovely god. It's the construction of an irresistibly seductive sadist.
Hume loves to provide instances to refute the argument that self-love reigns universally and in every case., that it alone can motivate approbation of others' actions. Hume should be read more. It infuriated Voltaire that Hume's Essay on Suicide was suppressed in England, and its suppression hugely lowered his estimation of the English. Voltaire knew the score, though he restricted his efforts to defeating human tyranny. He may have supposed, not without reason, that defeating Nature was impossible.
Labyrinthine vanity is terrible. It goes in every direction, and explores every passageway, except the right one. What did Eliot call them? Something something of the Law? 'Stern upholders' or 'strict Guardians', perhaps. He too viewed them as terrible. Isn't it they who precisely manipulate the shadows in Plato's cave? While outside innocent children play in the sunlight.
'What will it profit a man if he gain the whole world and thereby lose his own soul?' Doesn't this apply to the false teachings of the more dubious philosophers with their unending labyrinthine systems? None of which would stand up to the awkward questions of a Socrates or a Wittgenstein. Or the logical probings of a Gödl.
Apparently all Alexander wanted was to conquer. All to become another curious relic of history, a character in stories and depictions passed down through long ages. And a time may come when not even that will remain.
"Soul" has a frightening aspect, if understood as having a different life expectancy altogether from material bodies. If seen this way, people must be composed of two unrelated substances. I never use the word myself. I avoid it instinctively. "Mind" doesn't bother me as much, although its essence, just exactly what it is, is no more evident than the other's. All life inevitably faces a dark future, limited as it is only to knowing what it can sense. It's really asking too much always to be demanding people to reside in a state whose entire future is wholly beyond their control.
Montaigne was so disenchanted with the exponential multiplication of laws that he couldn't help wondering if none would be better. They tie people up iin numberless ways and so many of them are unknown until they ambush the unsuspecting.
It seems like Daedalus made a series of choices… That seems to be the essence of the matter.
Daedalus was clever, but not wise, one suspects.
Is there a difference?
As for Hume, last I checked he was one of the state philosophers for the British Empire, systems of empire being one of those big sources of the suffering you descry.
Most of the empiricist philosophers were mouth-pieces for empire (itself based on a perverse philosophy of man), from Bacon and Hobbes to Locke, Hume and Benthem (of Panopticon infamy). Not very good hombres by any estimation, if you ask me.
There's all the difference in the world between cleverness and wisdom. The young are clever while the old are wise. (At the very least they have survived.) One of the most important of the many troubles that so beset our world is the current prevalence of cleverness over wisdom. Isn't that what further education is all about? The gradual replacement of cleverness by wisdom.
It was Voltaire's disgust with the suppression in England of Hume's "On Suicide" that decided me to reacquaint myself with the latter. As long as he holds my interest I'll continue reading. He doesn't yet compel it as much as certain other thinkers, but so far he's making sufficient sense to me. Recently I stopped reading Seneca because of paean after paean to "Nature." That was a bad patch. Still, I'll probably return to him at some point. If you meant "decry," yes, I do decry it, and indeed condemn its cause.
Candid was written as a direct attack on Leibniz. Leibniz was by any measure a true universal genius, and also exposed Newton for the faker that he was. On the other hand, Voltaire played a big part in converting France and the Cartesians to the cult of Newton as well.
To this day, Newton is worship while Leibniz is treated as a footnote. That's not by chance.
Please read some Leibniz, Tom.
Discourse on Metaphysics is a must, as are the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondences.
I like 'the labyrinth of my vanity'. For that's precisely what it is, isn't it? We need to build cathedrals to something else. Something more important than ourselves. Then, when somebody attempts to deny or destroy it, we can appeal to something other than wounded self-love.
To the self-sacrificial, that is, the highest ethical achievement. Yet perfect asceticism won't suffice, were it even possible, because every species of life, including vegetative, equally deserves a mercifully induced final sleep. Lucretius smartly assures us that where we are is no construction of any lovely god. It's the construction of an irresistibly seductive sadist.
Hume loves to provide instances to refute the argument that self-love reigns universally and in every case., that it alone can motivate approbation of others' actions. Hume should be read more. It infuriated Voltaire that Hume's Essay on Suicide was suppressed in England, and its suppression hugely lowered his estimation of the English. Voltaire knew the score, though he restricted his efforts to defeating human tyranny. He may have supposed, not without reason, that defeating Nature was impossible.
Labyrinthine vanity is terrible. It goes in every direction, and explores every passageway, except the right one. What did Eliot call them? Something something of the Law? 'Stern upholders' or 'strict Guardians', perhaps. He too viewed them as terrible. Isn't it they who precisely manipulate the shadows in Plato's cave? While outside innocent children play in the sunlight.
'What will it profit a man if he gain the whole world and thereby lose his own soul?' Doesn't this apply to the false teachings of the more dubious philosophers with their unending labyrinthine systems? None of which would stand up to the awkward questions of a Socrates or a Wittgenstein. Or the logical probings of a Gödl.
Apparently all Alexander wanted was to conquer. All to become another curious relic of history, a character in stories and depictions passed down through long ages. And a time may come when not even that will remain.
"Soul" has a frightening aspect, if understood as having a different life expectancy altogether from material bodies. If seen this way, people must be composed of two unrelated substances. I never use the word myself. I avoid it instinctively. "Mind" doesn't bother me as much, although its essence, just exactly what it is, is no more evident than the other's. All life inevitably faces a dark future, limited as it is only to knowing what it can sense. It's really asking too much always to be demanding people to reside in a state whose entire future is wholly beyond their control.
'Guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable Law' is the more precise quote.
Montaigne was so disenchanted with the exponential multiplication of laws that he couldn't help wondering if none would be better. They tie people up iin numberless ways and so many of them are unknown until they ambush the unsuspecting.
It seems like Daedalus made a series of choices… That seems to be the essence of the matter.
Daedalus was clever, but not wise, one suspects.
Is there a difference?
As for Hume, last I checked he was one of the state philosophers for the British Empire, systems of empire being one of those big sources of the suffering you descry.
Most of the empiricist philosophers were mouth-pieces for empire (itself based on a perverse philosophy of man), from Bacon and Hobbes to Locke, Hume and Benthem (of Panopticon infamy). Not very good hombres by any estimation, if you ask me.
There's all the difference in the world between cleverness and wisdom. The young are clever while the old are wise. (At the very least they have survived.) One of the most important of the many troubles that so beset our world is the current prevalence of cleverness over wisdom. Isn't that what further education is all about? The gradual replacement of cleverness by wisdom.
It was Voltaire's disgust with the suppression in England of Hume's "On Suicide" that decided me to reacquaint myself with the latter. As long as he holds my interest I'll continue reading. He doesn't yet compel it as much as certain other thinkers, but so far he's making sufficient sense to me. Recently I stopped reading Seneca because of paean after paean to "Nature." That was a bad patch. Still, I'll probably return to him at some point. If you meant "decry," yes, I do decry it, and indeed condemn its cause.
I wish Tom would read more Leibniz!
Voltaire was an avowed enemy of Leibniz haha.
Candid was written as a direct attack on Leibniz. Leibniz was by any measure a true universal genius, and also exposed Newton for the faker that he was. On the other hand, Voltaire played a big part in converting France and the Cartesians to the cult of Newton as well.
To this day, Newton is worship while Leibniz is treated as a footnote. That's not by chance.
Please read some Leibniz, Tom.
Discourse on Metaphysics is a must, as are the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondences.
If god's good he isn't all-powerful, and if he's all-powerful, he most certainly isn't good.
Thank God! I rather like Nature. Isn't it more a matter of collaborating with it?
You should enjoy the aforementioned "bad patch" in Seneca.
I hear repentance & grief in this, for belated realization of commission of the highest of crimes.
It would help, as many thinkers have observed, if the inculcation of superstition were banned from education in the most impressionable years.
Experience, observation, independent reflection on these, might help in stemming the bloodtide.
Mercifully euthanizing life of every kind would help achieve a doom-free future, and restore all stolen peace.
The poem's imaginable theme overrides, for me, its oblique, classic, "artistic" style.
Sometime write the same theme absolutely forthrightly, in no uncertain terms. For example:
A Loose Translation
You ask why they love their murderer.
Because its wish is their desire.
You wonder how that could be.
It set them ablaze with wildfire.
You ask its reason for doing that.
To eat you alive and entire.
You wonder why life keeps providing.
Engorgement of parts made to sire.
You ask what inflates those prompters.
What made them its bloodlust's supplier.