attofishpi wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 4:14 am
...in a way that the rest of people in their time and now found rather profound.
Dubious wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 5:08 am
...spirituality... the nature of it almost impossible to explain.
Wizard22 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 9:45 am
...does not account for the Genius-level users who can take advantage of all of it.
Do you think we can only surrender to the mysterious greatness of those great philosophers? I think that it is possible to study good methods to better understand how we can emulate them. We just need patience and trying to make use of all of our human resources, rather than just the resource of reasoning.
Angelo Cannata wrote: ↑Fri Dec 01, 2023 8:36 pmDo you think we can only surrender to the mysterious greatness of those great philosophers? I think that it is possible to study good methods to better understand how we can emulate them. We just need patience and trying to make use of all of our human resources, rather than just the resource of reasoning.
The reason why philosophers are rare, even upon the mountains of postmodern internet information, is because the will required to become one is just as rare.
They need to 'want' to become philosophical inasmuch they are capable of becoming so.
Just because a kid is perfectly cut for Olympic sports, bodily, doesn't mean he has the Willpower for it.
I think this just moves the question to a different one: what makes philosophers not wanting to be philosophical or to be "one"? What caused this situation, what is its origin?
Wizard22 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2023 12:26 pm
When I discovered what Philosophy was, I knew that it was in my blood.
That's very interesting, because what we are talking about is the opposition between philosophy done just by reasoning and understanding, almost as if we were computers, and philosophy done by using, additionally, emotions, connection with our whole life, our body.
Moreover, I think we don't need to be highly competent in philosophical knowledge to have the passion of real philosophers. I think it can easily happen that professional philosophers who are much more educated than me don't have for philosophy a real passion of the heart. Obviously, ignorance doesn't help, I am not advocating it.
Wizard22 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2023 12:26 pm
When I discovered what Philosophy was, I knew that it was in my blood.
That's very interesting, because what we are talking about is the opposition between philosophy done just by reasoning and understanding, almost as if we were computers, and philosophy done by using, additionally, emotions, connection with our whole life, our body.
Moreover, I think we don't need to be highly competent in philosophical knowledge to have the passion of real philosophers. I think it can easily happen that professional philosophers who are much more educated than me don't have for philosophy a real passion of the heart. Obviously, ignorance doesn't help, I am not advocating it.
Socrates can be a good example of a philosopher who was spiritual, in the sense that his philosophy involved deeply his existence, but also very rational, that is Nietzsche's criticism against him. Socrates, after realising that he knew that he didn't knew, should have gone further. If we know that we don't know, what can we do as a next step? He didn't consider this next step. I think that a good next step is to make use of knowledge in two ways, the scientific and the artistic way. Scientifically, we can use knowledge for whatever science is useful, as we know; artistically, we can use knowledge and not-knowledge, thinking and not thinking as art instruments, musical instruments, to play with ideas, build perspectives, not because they are true, like great philosophers considered their systems, building metaphysics, but because they are able to give us a spiritual experience, eyes to experience life in different ways and, possibly, with better ways of being human.
Angelo Cannata wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 12:20 am
Socrates, after realising that he knew that he didn't knew, should have gone further. If we know that we don't know, what can we do as a next step? He didn't consider this next step.
His reputation rests mostly on the confession and rationale he knows that he knows not. Instead of instructing others, he should have been instructed by another whose examination was more insightful of what can and cannot be known by whatever means available. To Socrates, wisdom appears as a symptom of a permanent acknowledgement of ignorance whose condition is subject to the second law of an old Persian proverb:
He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a child, teach him in comparison to the dialogues in which he invariably rules as master.
In Plato's dialogs, Socrates only appeared wise compared to interlocutors whose thinking capacity seemed somewhat limited in giving a thought its due process.
I think that both Socrates and the Persian proverb got trapped into the metaphysics implied by the concepts of "knowing" and "teaching". Both concepts imply facts, both of them need reference to something conclusive. You cannot know or teach something if it is not a fact. In this context, the concept of "thinking" is different, because it is open to the concept of creativity. For example, you can think of a new idea, a new hypothesis, in the sense that you can create a new idea, a new hypothesis, right now, but you cannot know or teach a new idea or a new hypothesis unless it exists already. In this sense, an idea or an hypothesis that exists already is a fact: its existence is a fact.
But Nietzsche told us that there are no facts, but interpretations only. This is what enabled Socrates to confuse his interlocutors. We shouldn't be able to create confusion about facts, but actually we can, because whenever we are dealing with facts, we are dealing with our interpretations of them.
In this context, Socrates, the moment he says that he knows that he doesn't know, is exposed to the same attacks he used towards his interlocutors. For example, we can object: how do you know that you don't know something if you have absolutely no knowledge about it? Even if you don't refer your not knowing to anything definite, the objection is still valid: if you don't know, what makes you able to know that you don't know? Actually, saying "I know that I know not" claims of a lot of knowledge; this way, Socrates' saying is equivalent to say "I know a lot"; this deconstruction reveals that Socrates' expression is much less humble that it might seem, even to him, at a first look.
If we want to escape these tricks and traps about knowing and teaching, we need to criticise the metaphysics implied by these concepts. But criticising metaphysics is a hard task, because language forces us to imply metaphysics at every turn, every time we try to say something. Here is where philosophy can become spirituality, that is, philosophy should abandon a comprehension of itself as "knowledge" or "understanding", to adopt instead a style of dynamic playing, which reminds us Wittgenstein about language as a game and also Hermann Hesse's Glass bead game. Playing and dynamics is spirituality, it has the humbleness of not claiming truth, facts, knowledge, teaching; this does not mean that philosophy would become a low value activity: Hermann Hesse's game is actually the highest activity. We can compare it to the depth of playing music or to any other art. Philosophy should become a spiritual game where we explore creativity in relationship with our existence. This is what spirituality is.
