The Suicide of Intelligence

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

These days you are not understood if you say that the primacy of being has been substituted by nothingness. Most people stare at you with a dazed look. Yet, for anyone who has the slightest inkling of metaphysics, it is obvious that being primes over non-being, and that it is well and truly being which is, before nothingness… despite Jean-Saul Partre and the cortege of logy intellectuals of the 20th century. Thus negation has taken front stage, in all spirits, even those of the blockheads.

In short, if one is no longer understood on a metaphysical level, one can nevertheless clearly distinguish the primacy of negation concerning the human person and freedom. In this day and age, in the person we firstly see someone who is ailing (thanks to the psychocretins & co who have reduced the human person to personality), and in freedom the capacity to say “no”, that is to say the most infantile vision of things.

Thus we find the three poles where lies the solution to any problem (the person, truth, freedom) absolutely poisoned by negation: truth is firstly nothingness, the person is firstly ailing, and freedom is firstly saying “no”. If that is not a suicide of intelligence, it strangely resembles it, for what “falls” first in intelligence is being, not non-being, which figures the absence of being, thus the destruction through despair of intelligence, memory and will. Hence, we claim to fecund the spirit firstly with nothingness, that’s a good one, for it is exactly as hallucinating as a farmer who would sow “nothing” whilst prophesizing an unparalleled crop.


http://beingandquirkiness.blogspot.com/2009/09/suicide-of-intelligence.html

[Ponce]

That article is to much for me..........is like......who's on first.

[FunnyMoney]

Thanks for posting it, it seems so. Once they've gotten everybody to sacrifice their intelligence, the body and even eventually the soul, will follow suit.

[harvey]

Hey NE, hey everyone, I translated this for a good buddy (R.I.P.) who started with philosophy at the early age of 7 and tagged along a few "masters" of realistic thought along the way... anyways, I haven't wrapped my head completely around this post either :oo--> so I thought I'd post some more comprehensible stuff. As Outlanderish as it may seem, the initial error dates back to the 14th century when William of Ockham confounds substance-principle and the individual (also called first substance); up till then philosophy was a philosophy of substance. Substance answers the question of "what is being as being?" or what is the first principle in the order of being. My substance is my soul, but soul is not substance, else all that would be would live ::)

Anyhow, this is prolly still too much to grasp in one go, so here is something more accessible to chew on :fish

"I see in philosophy - in others words the thought of humankind - two main possible starting points: thought which starts by reflecting upon itself, and thought which starts by reflecting upon what is not itself.

In this respect, it is not correct, in the natural order, to say that we begin by reflecting upon ourselves. That is not what the child does! The child marvels on what around him is not him! Aristotle in this way seems to me to have this child spirit which marvels over what surrounds him and asks the why of things, whereas, for some time now, the Moderns have preferred the infantile spirit to the spirit of infancy - although they are persuaded of the contrary.

It follows that by starting with a philosophy of the spirit (or more exactly of relation - for the mind can radically only invent relations), negation evidently takes a capital importance, given that the spirit measures all the rest, and that the rest does not measure the spirit.

The two principal sources of Western philosophy are incarnated by Plato and Aristotle. The former developed a philosophy of relation, all sorts of relations, mostly proceeding from intuition and from a poetical inspiration which he had a gift for; the latter developed a philosophy of reality.

Have there been other philosophies since that time? Not to my knowledge. The immense majority of newer philosophies are philosophies of relation: Descartes with his "Cogito Ergo sum", setting explicitly his thought as solely reliable and as the first stone of all his research (he went as far as to indicate that he turned his back to Aristotle, and was therefore quite conscious of what he was doing); Hegel for whom the spirit also primes, the spirit being the spirit which transforms itself, and relation substituting itself clearly to substance; Nietzsche for whom man is the artistic person; Marx for whom man is the working man and who idealizes... matter!; Kant for whom what primes is transcendental subjectivity; Heidegger for whom being is being in the mind, and who reduces beings to... nothing. I don't see for that matter any other starting point which would not be either reality or relations produced by the mind, for philosophy would have to have a third actor which would be neither reality nor intelligence! I don't see any other... unless obviously if the profound nature of reality and/or of human nature were to change!

At the end of the day, there are those for whom being imposes itself to intelligence, and there are the others. In other words, either we accept that it is being which measures intelligence, and eventually, at the crest, being qua being, or we want to dominate over being, and in that case anything goes, absolutely anything! Further, to deny or refuse to give priority to being over spirit leads most often to stumbling into dialectics, with little chance of escaping from them.

If one does not accept to be dominated by being, and as one progressively discovers that it is via this route that intelligence attains its true nobility, then anything is possible, and it is this term "possible" which takes precedence over anything, for if intelligence is made essentially for being, to deny this leads to a suicide of the spirit. Therefore, that's where the choice lays, and, moreover and in my opinion, it would be rather sensible not to stray down the wrong path.

http://beingandquirkiness.blogspot.com/2009/01/two-sources.html

PS I didn't just sign up to the forum to answer this thread, I'm also a regular reader of financialsense, so I hope to pitch in on a few other subjects 8)

[harvey]

Mkay, this may be easier on the neuron, for a Sunday :P

A short spiel on realistic thought

Realistic thought, and an authentic metaphysics, does not set itself in the realm of ideas, nor immutable principles. Beyond observation, it seeks to analyse experimented reality by apprendending them in all their dimensions. This starting point does not exclude internal experience. However, it helps to understand that this experience, interesting as it may be, is not first under the scope of a quest for reality. However compelling and revealing, our internal experiences cannot be first in a radical sense; they are certainly closer to us, to our thoughts, but not to reality as it is.

If we take consciousness as a starting point, we box ourselves into what is most connatural, what is closest to our human activities... we cannot detach ourselves from the immanence of life, given that what is anterior to our consciousness is left to the wayside.

[jedemdasseine]

What are your thoughts on solipsism?

[harvey]

Solipsism = the epitome of idealistic thought

I much prefer the word ipsolipsism

When I say "I", we have a "relation", an identity with regards to myself. That one is called ipsolipsism. I really like that one because I must split myself in two, else I couldn't compare myself. Pretty cool, dont you think? Look:

- So, how am I doing today?
- Good, and me?
- Impeccable, but I missed myself a bit, I hadn't seen myself in a while.

;D ;)

[Gknowmx]

Have you read Rand? Rothbard? Mises?

Life is about awareness, it is about the continuous choice to map the endless and fractal boundary condition that lies between self and non-self. In chaos theory a Strange Attractor can be defined by a deceptively simple equation. When the function is view in a 2D representation, the Attractor appears to fill in a shape via an amazingly continous function where no two points overlap.

You can alway choose to stop being aware or even to stop being alive in reality and confine yourself to your spiritual dimension. The question is, why don't you (or doesn't one). It is interesting that one speaks of relationships, as in the relationship of spirit to reality, but then invokes the fact that spirit ultimately dominates reality in the end. If this is the case, if your reality takes you to that conclusion, then why would you waste even a moment longer lingering in reality?

[Book]

Life is about awareness, it is about the continuous choice to map the endless and fractal boundary condition that lies between self and non-self.


Unless there is that pesky Projection thingie...lol.


Psychological projection or projection bias (including Freudian Projection) is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.

Projection is considered one of the most profound and subtle of human psychological processes, and extremely difficult to work with, because by its nature it is hidden. It is the fundamental mechanism by which we keep ourselves uninformed about ourselves. Humor has great value in any attempt to work with projection, because humor presents a forgiving posture and thereby removes the threatening nature of any inquiry into the truth.

Paleo-anthropologically speaking, this faculty probably had survival value as a self-defense mechanism when homo sapiens' intellectual capacity to detect deception in others improved to the point that the only sure hope to deceive was for deceivers to be self-deceived and therefore behave as if they were being truthful.

[harvey]

Thanks for posting it, it seems so. Once they've gotten everybody to sacrifice their intelligence, the body and even eventually the soul, will follow suit.


It is not rare that a suicide of intelligence/spirit leads to a suicide of the body. Curiously, quite a few of Sartres followers committed suicide, but not Sartre himself.

[harvey]

It is interesting that one speaks of relationships, as in the relationship of spirit to reality, but then invokes the fact that spirit ultimately dominates reality in the end. If this is the case, if your reality takes you to that conclusion, then why would you waste even a moment longer lingering in reality?


I'm not sure I'm getting you. I think you need a certain degree of humility to accept reality as it is and to not want to dominate over Being. I'm not looking to get into a drawn out discussion here (time constraints), if you have the time and interest, the posts on http://beingandquirkiness.blogspot.com/ should give you a general feel for realistic thought.

And no I haven't read too much of philosophers outside realistic thinkers (ie a school of thought whose starting point is external experience through the five senses). Since Descartes time, most any philosophy has been idealistic in nature (with intuition or thought as a starting point).

http://beingandquirkiness.blogspot.com/2009/02/descartes-errors.html

[jedemdasseine]

Solipsism = the epitome of idealistic thought





Why? Why the epitome?

And what are your thoughts on the role of language in one's way of thinking, specifically, how alphabeticism leads to and or promotes certain types of thinking over others. The Ancient Greeks had one of the earliest alphabets and developed certain ways of thinking, whereas non-alphabetic cultures developed other ways of thinking. Old quasi- and proto- alphabetic languages, such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, engendered in their cultures quasi- and proto- Greek/Western ways of thinking. Cf. Hebrew and Arabic and how they are functionally different from both each other and the Germanic and Latin languages. Cf. Chinese. Dig deep, my friend. One can find across the millennia deep patterns in neuro-linguistics that apply directly to philosophy.

I fear you may be projecting more than you realize. Maybe not, as I've yet to see the big picture for which you are arguing.

By the way, watch your concinnity. It detracts from your message.

[Saul Mine]

A slightly clearer exposition. (http://home.comcast.net/~steveham21/turbo.mpg)

[harvey]

And what are your thoughts on the role of language in one's way of thinking,
I fear you may be projecting more than you realize. Maybe not, as I've yet to see the big picture for which you are arguing.
Interesting points you bring up, however Being (substance-principle) is upstream of the concrete and abstract (ie language) modes of existence. In fact, the great rival of metaphysics/first philosophy is logic, assisted by its accomplice, language, for logic necessarily stops at speech, as for logic reality is the being of reason (or universal), in other words a being borne from a relation created by intelligence. One can well speculate on coins or words, neither signify the reality which they represent ;D The appetite of intelligence is to seek the first principles - ie Substance and Act - which idealistic schools of thought do not reach.
http://beingandquirkiness.blogspot.com/2009/06/substance.html
[that said, neuro-linguistics is clearly an interesting field]


By the way, watch your concinnity. It detracts from your message.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm well aware that it is easy to lose the original flow in translation. It is also vital to have a perfect grasp the underlying thought process of the author - which I'm 90-95 per cent happy with (as far as these musings are concerned). My English is a bit rusty, so I have gone back and corrected a few expressions, and will probably make some more tweaks in the future. Overall, though, I think the concinnity holds pretty well together. ;D A difficulty for the reader is to understand the language, which may be new to him and has often been "corrupted" [a discussion between a realistic and an idealistic "thinker" often stops short because of the equivocity of the language].
By the way, modern day Aristolians are mostly logicians, as they have forgotten his first philosophy was the summit of his philosophical quest, in great part because of the aforementionned error. In fact, I don't think there is a translation of Aristotle's metaphysics on the market which is error free (some even say the inverse of what he meant). My buddy was writing a trilogy (Substance, Act, Human person) on first philosophy, but, alas... :'(

[Carl]

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players ~ William Shakespeare

Two questions arise:

Who gets to write the play?

And

Who gets to decide your roll in it?


Philosophy, for the most part, is merely a distraction..............

[jedemdasseine]

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players ~ William Shakespeare

Two questions arise:

Who gets to write the play?

And

Who gets to decide your roll in it?


Philosophy, for the most part, is merely a distraction..............





Philo, love
Sophia, wisdom

Love of wisdom most philosophy is not.

Well said Carl.


A few more questions for our new friend harvey:

The Aristotelian / Platonic dichotomy is obviously fundamental to all Western philosophy, and rightfully so. Why, do you think, after so many centuries, it still casts such a large shadow over not only philosophy, but Western thought, whatever?

And are you familiar with the philosophical aspects and leanings of such thinkers as Georges Bataille, St. Augustine, James Joyce, and the pre-Socratic philosophers? Do you have any specific thoughts on them? Quite an unrelated group, I know.

Is the unexamined life worth living?

Also, what are your thoughts on the philosophical validity of non-Western texts, such as The Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu?