Life as a manifestation of the universe
- Thread starter NoEgo
- Start date
Small point, but I never said you did.
fela fan said:
Well you see, I don't think we are digressing. I think it's very important. When somebody presents an idea and we wish to see how valid that idea is then we test that idea. We can test it's logical integrity or it's factual integrity but we can also test it by looking at it's consequences. Here I think you should run your idea through an ethical test - I think you should consider the ethical implications of what you say. Now you do admit that you have an ethic worth bothering with - so tell us about this ethic. Believe it or not I'm interested in what you have got to say on this.
fela fan said:
I think you misunderstand what a crime is if you think it is just a matter of personal opinion.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
It really won’t do to claim that language isn't up to the challenge of expressing philosophical notions. Especially if we agree, as we did, passim, that philosophy is in large part about reason. All the current evidence suggests that language and reason co-evolved; a real dialectic took place, with each leap in the evolution of one leading to a leap in the evolution of the other. (Dawkins describes just such evolutionary chain reactions towards the end of his recent book, the Ancestor’s Tale).
Furthermore, language is a social adaptation. How can it be anything else? It must have a use, and its use must be inter-personal. The intra-personal must be secondary. Therefore intra-personal reasoning cannot “lie beyond language”; it can only function because of language, and must therefore be communicable. Any one individual can only construct reasoning using a mechanism that is known to be a social mechanism: language. That individual can have no philosophy that is beyond the stuff of which it is made. Words don’t limit thinking, they enable it, in a very real and fundamental sense.
This is not the same as asserting that it is always easy to communicate our ideas, especially if our ideas are poorly formulated, or, indeed, not fully formed.
Don’t take my word for it, though. You can look at the work of Steven Pinker, of Merlin Donald, and, yes, of Noam Chomsky, wearing his other hat.
Here you bring up the question of how ethics come about. Again, we are looking at the social evolution of humankind. For a full, and readable, discussion of this I recommend Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds. (I recommend it anyway, to you Fela; I think you’ll get a lot out of it). For our purposes in this discussion, though, the subtitle gives enough of a précis: “how nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong”. We, as a species, have evolved (in a fully Darwinian sense) a “deep morality”, in much the same way as we evolved (again, in the sense of selective adaptations) a “deep grammar”. That is fitting, given the social function of both. We are social animals, and it is therefore also fitting that two of our distinguishing features (three if we think back to our discussion of reason) are social.
Now, of course, that notion of yours that killing rabbits is equivalent to killing humans is not a universal ethic. You have extrapolated it, using empathy and reason, from the “deep morality” of right and wrong. You ought to be able to give us an idea of the steps that got you there. You ought to be able to do that using language. Unless, that is, you have gone the way of Douglas Adams’ Ruler of the Universe, and have taken your solipsism the length of not knowing whether you are talking to us or singing to a cat.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Yeah, but fela's on a reheated Buddhism-style 'language obscures the truth' thing.
It is interesting that the primary difference between the main lines of thinking between 'west' and 'east' come down to explication and language - Eastern philosophies tend to emphasise the acceptance of mystery, the concept of wordless enlightenment (also echoed in s'tori), whereas the strongest Western philosophies emphasise the need to question, question, question endlessly, and that answers can not only be found but also expressed in language, no matter how imperfectly.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Mysticism is also found in Celtic and early Saxon Christianity. c/f the Cloud of Unknowing.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
True, and it's still there in the wibbling of the new-agers I guess, but the primary strand of Western thought has been to explain, not give up and say 'Nah, we can't answer this, so neither will you'
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
The whole gnomic Zen obscurantism kept me entertained for about 15 mins when I was stoned one night aged 14, but I'm afraid I fucking hate mystics now. And hippies.
(I read a book once called Zen Garden, I think. Small turquoise-green hardback. It was one wilfully nonsensical line of meaningless drivel after another. That is what I call charlatanism. It isn't deep; it's bollocks).
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Another poster on here was telling me about their experiences of attending a Buddhist monastary while in Nepal, and it basically came down to:
'You will never find answers by asking questions'
'That's fucking ridiculous, I'm off'
'You will never find answers by asking questions'
'That's fucking ridiculous, I'm off'
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Language is limited, but that doesn't mean that obscurantist language is any less limited. Being obscure just means you cannot be held account to what you say. That is it is less limiting for the speaker - but it isn't any less limited in what it expresses.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Yeah, but you're just trying to label and confine my free mind with all you words and terms and other stuff, man.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Or maybe you're singing to my cat? How can I know?
This is my favourite Buddhist story:
In an old Zen story it has been said that a certain monk name Kakua was asked to appear before the Emperor and explain the essence of Zen. Kakua arrived at the court and stood quietly before the Emperor and all his esteemed advisors and courtesans who had all gathered to hear this renowned teacher. After standing for a long period in silence, during which time the court grew agitated, Kakua removed a bamboo flute from the folds of his robe, blew one short single tone, bowed politely and left. He returned to the mountains where he was seldom heard from again.
In an old Zen story it has been said that a certain monk name Kakua was asked to appear before the Emperor and explain the essence of Zen. Kakua arrived at the court and stood quietly before the Emperor and all his esteemed advisors and courtesans who had all gathered to hear this renowned teacher. After standing for a long period in silence, during which time the court grew agitated, Kakua removed a bamboo flute from the folds of his robe, blew one short single tone, bowed politely and left. He returned to the mountains where he was seldom heard from again.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
That's the kind of thing to make a Reich, Riley and Glass cry...
Not to mention John Cage.
Thinking about this, you are flat out wrong here. To say something of the form "X is a Y" is not merely to label X as being a Y - it tells us how the subject "X" is related to the predicate "Y". It tells us something (which may or may not be correct of course). At the same time it does not remove the conceptual nature of the concept of "X" - that's just ludicrous. It doesn't limit our understanding of "X". It doesn't say "X is nothing but a Y".
There is only one type of word that is a strictly speaking just a label. We call these words "propper nouns".
If I were to call you "fela fan", then that is genuine labelling. Of course that is uninteresting, it tells us nothing. The only thing it does is set up a convention so we can refer to you. Labelling (or naming) is indeed an extremely limited part of language. But it's because of that that it is so completely harmless.
So let's be clear. Nobody complains about limited language. Why complain about something that is harmless? People only complain when they are called something because it isn't just a label - it is telling us something. What you are really complaining about is the fact that danny la rouge said something with some content that applied to something you said. He might have been right, he might have been wrong, it might have been an unwelcome comment, but he didn't just label.
So let's not hear any more nonsense about using "limited language".
Not a small point, if you didn't then i erred in my thinking.
My ethic i referred to is the only one i try to follow, because all other ethics become a natural outcome of that one ethic. What i mean is, if one loves and respects all life, then there can be no intention to cause hurt or harm to other people, or to animals, or even to things like trees and our natural world. If i deliberately try to cause harm to you, for example, then i cause harm to myself. I see all life as interconnected, and that what you give out tends to come back to you. I believe that by having love and empathy for our fellow humans means that other ethics become redundant.
When i spoke of 'crime', i added it was my opinion, because i don't think my 'crime' is the same as the dictionary definition. It is linked to what i've just said - there are man laws and nature laws. I try wherever possible to follow the nature laws. Too many laws by man are just plain wrong or stupid or overly controlling, giving power to those in power at the expense of the rest of us. If there is a conflict between a man law and the nature law, i follow the latter.
Well, i didn't mean to suggest that it isn't up to that particular challenge. What i think is that you can only go so far with philosophy. I may have this wrong, although i accept there are other reasons for philosophy, but i've always understood that philosophy's main objective is to seek answers to who we humans are and why we are here, and so on.
For me, those answers cannot be adequately found using language, because language can only represent the workings of the mind. It cannot speak for the heart, the soul, the spiritual dimension of life. I have said before on this forum that i see a progression in life that begins with the political, moves on to the philosophical, and ends with the spiritual. So when i say language is limiting, i mean that it has yet to meet the challenge of describing the spiritual in such a way that one can communicate what it is to be spiritual.
I think that the spiritual begins when the philosophical burns itself out. We've had thousands of philosophers, many with their books and written ideas, but so much disagreement. With disagreement it means the universal answers philosophy seeks are yet to be found. They never will be.
I have no problem with the idea of language and reason coevolving. But there is life beyond reason, and language has yet to catch up, if it ever will.
I can just as easily take your word for something as a chomsky a pinker, a whoever. If i can verify it with my own experience, then that's fine by me. Otherwise it just has to be filed away as the possible.
Perhaps i'm misunderstanding you here, but of course language is a social thing. In this view of it, it must be said that many animals have their own language, since they are also social organisms.
You keep referring to reasoning, but there's more to human life than reasoning! Yes, reasoning is language-based but life doesn't stop at reasoning. However, i can accept that if philosophy is viewed as reasoning, then language IS up to the task, and is not limiting.
I agree, language allows thinking (but i maintain that language can also shut down thinking), but i also say that upon reaching a certain level of thinking, we cannot go any further with language. To get in the spiritual dimension will have required thinking, reason, language as a stepping stone. But ultimately there is more to life than language currently can inform us, and we have to ditch language. Sapir and whorf talked about whether language led to thinking, or whether thinking led to language. Now, there are concepts here in thailand expressed by single words that have no direct translation in english. Can an english person live by such a concept without having a word for it? Can we experience things that language cannot adequately convey to another person? I say yes!
Great story! The Lacan of his day. But at least Zen Buddhists are good at garden design.
Thank you for that recommendation. It does indeed look like a book i'll enjoy, i shall actually make an effort to get it! I like the basic ideas he proposes (well, according to the reviews i've just read). If we have a language acquisition device, and we surely must have, then i agree that we can have a moral compass too that is nature rather than nuture.
But as a species we have those in power who have forever tried to muddy the waters over behaviour and social conventions and judgmental behaviour. They normally come under the guise of religious and political beings. For me, we are born with everything we need to live a peaceful just and respectful life. Trouble is there are those in our species who spend 18 years at least in covering things up. What i mean is that love comes before hate, peace comes before war. Nature provides us with all, but we have also developed nurture (conditioning is a more appropriate term here i think) that goes against nature. We as individuals need to offload things rather than find them. Our species has given us a legacy: natural language and morality, and power over others that reduces people to criminals who subvert the nature that is our guide.
Since we are part of nature, then so are we the whole of it.
OK thanks for that. Two comments:
Firstly I think it is your sense of ethics which allow you to assert that fed up people (you can label them "living dead" but I would prefer just "fed up people" because its less confusing) have deminished self awareness. I don't think you are being judgemental but you are nevertheless making an ethical comment. For instance I don't think you would say that fed up people cannot recognise themselves in the mirror - it's not a matter of technical state of consciousness. Rather I think you are making a comment about their lack of ethics ie. unawareness of natural laws. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Secondly I should say I don't care for your sense of ethics simply because it's asocial.
I think you're leading me to a reevaluation for how i should refer to 'fed-up' people. I don't mean to make judgments at all, and from this particular debate and thread, i can see now the rather judgmental nature of the 'living dead'. It does seem an unfair term. I must say, your term for now better fits, and i shall use it from hereon in unless i find a better term.
I don't really get your second point. You've got ethics in the plural when i suggested i only follow one, and what do you mean by 'asocial'?
OK cool.
fela fan said:
On your first point, I'm sticking with the convention of talking about ethics in the plural - that's all.
By asocial - I think your ethic lacks any explicit reference to the fact you are a social animal living in a social world. I believe this is central to human ethics - not a secondary consideration deriving from a love of living things. From what you have said you should be as concerned about a flower as you are about your fellow (wo)man.
The ethic i talked of naturally leads to a moral guide and sense to what is wrong or right in one's behaviour towards other humans. If one naturally gives out love, then surely, while in such a state, there can never be any intention to harm or hurt another person. And that is what i thought ethics were concerned with, guiding one to rightful behaviour. My point really is that if one is loving towards his brothers and sisters, then this inherently removes intent to harm others.
I take your point about the comparison with a flower, but i think you picked a poor example. That flower will grow again, while a killed human will not.
But yes, i do necessarily value the life of a fellow human over that of a rat or ant or whatever. I did want though to point out that with this overriding ethic, it also becomes difficult to harm anything that has life.
So i think with this one governing ethic, behaviour is rightful without any other explicitly stated ethics, or norms of behaviour. I think that it therefore does cover the fact that i am a social animal living in a social world.
Peace, love, understanding, for me is the only guide anyone really needs. Not always easy to live up to it, but such are the frailties of being human.
I recognised this in my post. I was aware that you could derive a social ethics from your ethic - my point was that it wasn't central. When it comes down to it, your ethic is about you not about others.
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