How To Tell Right From Wrong

[artisticsolution]

How hard it is to attempt to communicate difficult ideas to one who has no preparation. The Medieval (in this case Aristotelian) cosmology is the structure of view out of which our ideas about good and evil come. Or, to put it another way, the structure of understanding by which ideas of good and evil are expressed. To make statements about good and evil one has to define man.

This represents the root of philosophy and the starting-point of modern philosophy! It is likely that little or none of this will make any sense to you - your mind is mush - but I notice that others read here. The point of a forum like this is to learn. To be challenged.

Ideas have consequences.

I am constrained by the fact that I'm writing on a tablet. In a day or two I will offer some commentary on the selections from Harding Craig's work, The Enchanted Glass.

LOL Dear silly little boy...the point of my thread is how to tell right from wrong if you are a christian. Have you forgotten already? Most people's minds are "mush", and you are no exception or you would not insist on them learning something that they could not possibly understand. Ergo, it is like I said, Just another patriarch dick, wanting to tell people what to do, as if he holds a patent on morality. Please!

My way is easy. It is for the masses. Your way is for yourself only, and no one else...as if you had anything worthwhile to say, you would be at Harvard or Yale in front of an audience, instead of here in this thread, spouting your nonsense to a woman you accuse of having a 'mushy girlie mind'!

Now, how stupid does one have to be, to have a continuing conversation with someone who they believe can't understand them?

Be gone! You have no power here girlie man!

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Patience, patience: in time many interesting things will be brought out. I think I well understand your reactions. All that has importance here are the ideas, not the emotions.

[Lacewing]

Patience, patience: in time many interesting things will be brought out.

Oh no... another Great One bringing messages from afar... that we must wait for the revelation of. I've heard it before, Gustav... (God, how many times?)... and it's too melodramatic... and always empty. I don't know who you think you're talking to... or who you think you are... and I mean no disrespect... but your arrogant attitude does not appear as a sign of intelligence, even if you are intelligent. Arrogance that puts others down as you have been doing, is (in my opinion) a sign of the most dangerous kind of ignorance. The ignorant arrogance of man is extraordinarily destructive... and I seem to be losing my tolerance for even "playing nice" with it.

If a person isn't capable of being respectful, I think their "ideas" will likely be too full of themselves to offer any real clarity.

[Obvious Leo]

Patience, patience: in time many interesting things will be brought out. I think I well understand your reactions. All that has importance here are the ideas, not the emotions.

How dare you presume to abuse the privilege of a philosophy forum to preach in such a sanctimonious and insulting tone. Try taking your pulpit to the park and bellowing your eternal verities to the great unwashed there gathered. Beware of rotten fruit.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Patience, patience: in time many interesting things will be brought out. I think I well understand your reactions. All that has importance here are the ideas, not the emotions.

You can cram this question with as many ideas as you like. You can bring logic to bear, also. But as soon as you analyse the results of any moral investigation and reverse engineer it to it primitive assumptions, and premises, you end up with statements that are generated by feelings, and or based on needs and desires that have no direct necessary logical basis.

Give it a try!

So at the heart of all morality is the human heart, evolved in groups for the most part but honed with the necessity of survival. Yet because the means do not know the ends, such behaviour cannot be predicted by knowing that.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

You can cram this question with as many ideas as you like. You can bring logic to bear, also. But as soon as you analyse the results of any moral investigation and reverse engineer it to it primitive assumptions, and premises, you end up with statements that are generated by feelings, and or based on needs and desires that have no direct necessary logical basis.

I don't know much of your thinking so I can't base too much on the hunch I get from this paragraph. But I think it self-contradicts and also points to one of the important 'truths' of the Medieval era generally, out of which most or all of our ground of thinking comes: If there is no 'necessary logical basis', and even if notions of good and evil come out of sentiments, it points to understanding - the base of all that is human - and volition which is the factor of independence (reasoned choice and free will).

The Medieval world possibly absolutely, and the primitive and pre-modern world generally, and most certainly the Christian mind, recognizes a superior intelligence or a surrounding intelligence to which man has a link that he can, if you will, hone and exploit. To consider good and evil in a Christian sense is, as I say, to retrace the cosmological model of the older, but also the base, conceptual system.

In my own sense of things I think I generally agree with you: We are organisms very rooted in nature and biology and 99% of our thinking is 'sensory' and enmeshed in emotion. One good reason to identify emotive reasoning and, if possible, bring it to another level. Can it be pulled off 'ultimately'? Not likely.

[uwot]

Gus; you're back again. Fancy that. Still talking pretentious twaddle, I see.

[Gary Childress]

All that has importance here are the ideas, not the emotions.

Hi Mr. Bjornstrand,

Honest question: Do you believe it is the case that many of us (certainly including myself) may be acting on emotions which are unguided by coherent ideas? For example we see something that we don't like, or know is not right, and we lash out over it, but if our reaction isn't guided by some sort of coherent conceptual framework then it's sort of like a person drowning in a river, we grab and flail wildly at everything including those who might wish to help us, until someone reaches out and pulls us out of the water? I mean, I certainly see need and a proper place for emotions within the psyche. I think emotions often are catalysts for action (although in the case of "flight", they may simply become paralyzing).

Just to clear up any misunderstandings which may exist, I sort of get the idea that you are not above saying that emotions are completely irrelevant. Is that an accurate assessment?

Thanks.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Gary Childress,

There are two different levels of reply that can be offered. To understand Christian thinking, which arises out of our recent Medieval context, we have to trace the ideas outlined in the Medieval era. In any case, that is my view, but certainly backed up by the sources that I read. But, if you're asking me what I think personally, then you'll get another, somewhat different, answer.

If we are to consider Christianity, and what Christianity proposes, then man has the possibility of communion with superior intelligence and the choice to receive in idea or intuition or in revelation, 'messages' or intimations that he may choose to respond to. This was clearly pictured in medieval thought, and it was never doubted. It was a fact of cosmology that man could rise up out of his biological, emotional, and existential context, and respond to a higher impulse. Not to do so led to disaster.

If I were to make a critique of our present, that is, the present that we live in and that dictates over us to greater or lesser degrees, I would say that we live in a context which pushes us toward emotional and sensory reaction. Especially advertising trains us to respond at non-rational levels, though the influences that dominate us, and their mechanisms, are very complex. Significantly, more and more it seems, we abandon ourselves to processes that are not rational.

Let us for the sake of conversation call the emotional and the sensory our female or feminine side. Our present desires us to be ruled by our feminine side because it is the part of us that is most easily manipulated. But what appears reasonable to our emotions is not necessarily truly reasonable. I suggest that thinking must be re-masculinified. However, in our present that statement is highly polemical. In fact it represents a form of thoughtcrime!

I think the object, if we are able to define an object, is to elevate sentiments, and bring the emotions to a sophisticated level, to steer ourselves away from raw emotional and sensual desire, and to define a higher territory for the focus of our consciousness. I suggest that this is basically the Christian program, and it is the underpinning of our cultural ethics. However, for me I find the idea very clearly expressed in Vedic prayer and mantra. I would not exclusively contextualize it in a Christian setting. But I note that when some people hear this expressed, something rises up in them and they condemn it as a 'patriarchal' formulation. And perhaps that is so. But in any case it is the basis of civilization.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Hello there uwot. I come around seasonally, like a comet of (ill?) omen. Soon I will veer off again ...

Twaddle. Harrumph ...

[uwot]

Hello there uwot.

Wotcher, Gus.

I come around seasonally, like a comet of (ill?) omen. Soon I will veer off again ...
Twaddle. Harrumph ...

No complaint about 'pretentious' then?

[Obvious Leo]

Soon I will veer off again ...

We can only hope. Your prattle is amongst the most offensive I've ever encountered in more than a decade of participation in various philosophy forums and your opinions are not only infantile but dangerous. Of such puerile certainties are jihadists made.

[Hobbes' Choice]

You can cram this question with as many ideas as you like. You can bring logic to bear, also. But as soon as you analyse the results of any moral investigation and reverse engineer it to it primitive assumptions, and premises, you end up with statements that are generated by feelings, and or based on needs and desires that have no direct necessary logical basis.

I don't know much of your thinking so I can't base too much on the hunch I get from this paragraph. But I think it self-contradicts and also points to one of the important 'truths' of the Medieval era generally, out of which most or all of our ground of thinking comes: If there is no 'necessary logical basis', and even if notions of good and evil come out of sentiments, it points to understanding - the base of all that is human - and volition which is the factor of independence (reasoned choice and free will).

The Medieval world possibly absolutely, and the primitive and pre-modern world generally, and most certainly the Christian mind, recognizes a superior intelligence or a surrounding intelligence to which man has a link that he can, if you will, hone and exploit. To consider good and evil in a Christian sense is, as I say, to retrace the cosmological model of the older, but also the base, conceptual system.

In my own sense of things I think I generally agree with you: We are organisms very rooted in nature and biology and 99% of our thinking is 'sensory' and enmeshed in emotion. One good reason to identify emotive reasoning and, if possible, bring it to another level. Can it be pulled off 'ultimately'? Not likely.

You are a windbag. Either point out my contradiction or bugger off.
I made a valid point. responding with hot air is not an argument.
What I said is straight forward, self evident and incontrovertible.
My statement contains a challenge. Take it or leave it.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

It is a more or less meamingless term, uwot, but you know that, right? If you defined it more sharply I might understand better. I do remember a quip of yours that always makes me smile. I said "This is philosophy, right?" And you said "Tragically, yes". Still makes me laugh.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Not interested much in your challenge, Hobbes. Can we leave it there?