Sauron and Saruman (to say nothing of Melkor, their mentor) are representatives of Law in this dynamic. Do you remember Saruman's words to Gandalf when he was trying to convince him to join them? "Knowledge, Rule, Order". That is his motto. A lot of good it did him :).

But this is perhaps a nitpick. I agree that Chaos is the servant of life, and that is one of the main points of this reflection. What I noticed there is that Law:Chaos is a polarity that is often presented as analogous to Good:Evil, but that the evidence of modern pop fiction runs contrary to the analogy, and I agree with the artists behind those conceptions. There are other polarities which are not as stark as they seem at first glance. One of them is War:Peace. I (a pacifist) am confounded by the need that my mind presents, of accepting the Heraclitus quote that "all things are born in War", i.e., that War, taken symbolically, is on the side of Good (and Peace is on the side of Evil! or at least on the side of Death, in the Life:Death polarity). What Heraclitus was pointing at, I suppose, is precisely this Law:Chaos dynamic.

For your purposes, it would be far more efficient to abolish the idea of limited liability.

For Plato all perfection comes from the Agathon (which is the Sun in the Parable of the Cave). The Agathon is therefore the analogous of "God" in a Christian framework (which I presume you are using when referring to God), and the idea of the just man (present in the discourse, most of all, in the example of Socrates, rather than discursively) is derivative in the sense that his justice comes from his yearning towards the Agathon. Remember that for Plato all persons live "in the middle", in an intermediate field between ideas and corruptible matter; and our knowledge of ideas comes from having beheld them in a prior existence (i.e., not in an existence comparable to our current, material one).

So, no, the just man (and any other idea) is not superior to God. I think the best that can be said is that ideas are aspects of God, but that formulation would never result in them being superior, or not even equal, to God. They are, after all, limited, while the Agathon is not.

Your view is all too rare. William James thought that the mind followed the body as well — Bitter Crank

It is another application of Pascal's wager. If people could get rid of the prejudice and read the relevant portion of the Pensées, it would do a lot of good.

If you want to believe otherwise as you now do, figure out how your behavior would change, and then change it. The mind follows the body.

If your behavior wouldn't change, why would you want to change your belief?

If a new study found it, it must be true.

Sounds a bit superstitious to me, but to each his own.

I missed the part about the descent into hell.

Here's Aquinas again on it:

http://newadvent.org/summa/4052.htm

@SapereAude

Check Aquinas' Summa Theologiae III-1-1.

Here's what he had to say specifically about the question you asked:

The mystery of Incarnation was not completed through God being changed in any way from the state in which He had been from eternity, but through His having united Himself to the creature in a new way, or rather through having united it to Himself. But it is fitting that a creature which by nature is mutable, should not always be in one way. And therefore, as the creature began to be, although it had not been before, so likewise, not having been previously united to God in Person, it was afterwards united to Him.

@johnGould

I don't have the time, unfortunately, to engage in writing the long posts that the topic deserves. So, I will just point to some books that will surely be of interest for vou.

The easiest one to find is the multi-volume "History of Political Ideas" by Eric Voegelin. It discusses many of your themes -- and Spengler as well. His major work is "Order and History", which I highly recommend, too.

One small and extraordinary book that looks at it from something closer to your "Gestalt approach" is perhaps still unavailable in English. It is the "Six Diseases of the Contemporary Spirit", by the Romenian philosopher Constantin Noica. Hard to summarize it.

My two hurried cents...

The Christians I admire appear to never waste a moment's thought on the so-called 'mystery of the trinity' — andrewk

To believe in X and to give a moment's thought about X are quite independent from each other.

Questions 27-29.

I don't want to be too much of a curmudgeon, so here goes a short summary of each:

Q. 27 - what does it mean to say that there is procession (i.e. diversity) in God? What kind of diversity is there? Does it violate divine simplicity?

Q. 28 - Can there be relations within an absolutely simple God? How?

Q. 29 - Is it correct to apply the word "person" to these relations within the deity? Why?

You want an argument, but what is required is a revision of the meaning of the terms being used (and this cannot be done through argumentation). Take a chance and read what Aquinas has to say. Be assured that Aquinas is much, much smarter than Craig or van Inwegen or any other philosopher mentioned in the video.

And another caveat: regardless of the brains of Aquinas, this topic is not amenable to brute force, unaided by revealed wisdom. From a human (natural reason) viewpoint, Trinitarian dogma is an unnecessary hypothesis. It is not required to explain any data of nature, or any insight about the deity. Its usefulness arises as an instrument to interpret Scripture (particularly Jesus' teachings about his own role). People who do not accept those sayings have no use for Trinitarian dogma, and it is no wonder that they don't engage in the conceptual effort to reconfigure the terms being used so as to make the words adjust to the available data. But for those who take seriously stuff like "I and the Father are one", "Go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost", "I will send you a Paraclete", etc. Trinitarian dogma is among the most intriguing ideas to have crossed any human mind (and it opens up a wealth of metaphorical wisdom to deal with quite unrelated subjects).

I don't have patience for this back and forth nowadays, sorry. You should have tried it 15 years ago.

Perhaps if you can specify what is the main problem (rather than give a list or a handwave), we can pick it up and run with it. I'll do it through a link to a question to the Summa, since that's how the Summa is organized -- in a question and answer format. Your question is already answered there. It ought to be enough to prod you into checking it, but to each his own.

Since you brought it up, why not make the argument that you think Aquinas makes and then we can see if it is worth the time?

Said the guy who posted a video link.

Well, I watched the video. It was not worth the time. You'll have to take a chance, apparently, just like I did.

There is a terminological issue underlying the problem. The word "will" is not univocal. It is used to address different movements (or, powers) of the psyche, and "freedom" does not apply to all of them with the same fit (or at all).

In Latin (for example), the word is translated (at least!) as either libido or voluntas. (We must not forget that free will is liberum arbitrium, yet a third word).

Libido, the chain of passions, is never construed as free. Plato represented it as the dark horse in his chariot analogy. St. Paul referenced it by saying that "the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I do". The most common Christian reference to it talks of it as slavery --i.e., the opposite of freedom. Expressions such as "slave to sin" and "slave to death" are found in the New Testament.

Voluntas, on the other hand, is the thing/movement/power of the psyche that is deemed to be free to choose between alternatives. {Cf. Buridan's Ass). Its freedom, by itself and unaided, does not give it power to overcome the slavery of libido. Plato speaks of the "weak tug of the golden cord"; Buddhism is a full program for taming the passions so as to enable the freedom of the will to reach the forefront; Christianity emphasizes the role of grace (i.e., how the will, unaided, cannot choose the good). Etc.

Summing up, libertarian free will, by treating the human will as a monolithic thing/power/movement, loses explanatory power and becomes more of a slogan than a useful concept. It is important to observe the various internal aspects of what is called, in English, "will", and to predicate freedom only of the part that is actually able to choose among alternatives.

Check the chapters of the Summa I mentioned and linked to. Then get back and let's discuss it.

If one is interested in the history behind the dogma, a good source is "Retrieving Nicaea", by Khaled Anatolios. He shows very well how the "scriptural data" were universally accepted by all parties of the discussion about the divinity of Christ, about the nature of the Holy Spirit, etc.; in other words, the development of the dogma was a response to some aporias that were present in the first texts of the religion, and particularly among the many sayings of Jesus that indicated tensions between Jesus-as-man and Jesus-as-divine. St. Paul's formulation of the issue in Colossians is sufficiently ambiguous to not solve anything :D -- https://biblehub.com/colossians/1-19.htm

However, it must be noted that the fact of the dogma having been developed as it was (rather than, e.g., in an Arian direction) was predicated on the decisive influence of St. Antony (a very important influence on Athanasius), who, in the third century, was giving direct testimony on the divinity of Christ. To put it differently: the divinity of Christ (rather than his primacy among creatures -- the Arian interpretation of the texts) was selected, among other reasons, because Antony declared that he knew, by direct apprehension of Christ, that Christ was God. And people, including Athanasius, believed in Antony, on account of his all too obvious holiness. In other words, it was not solely a matter of textual interpretation. Of course, since Antony, hundreds of other saints have reinforced that aspect, of the direct apprehension of Christ's divinity.

In my opinion, there are two great classical sources on the logical analysis of the Trinity itself -- St. Augustine (De Trinitate) and St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa. Both, in different ways, clarify a lot of the doubts raised here. My own preference is Aquinas: in the Summa Theologiae, the questions 27-43 of the First Part are an in-depth analysis of the Trinity. I still remember the joy of reading it for the first time some 20 years ago, and of understanding so much that is obscure about the idea of the Trinity.

http://newadvent.org/summa/1.htm

Methodically, science is a way of thinking - demonstrated to establish reliable knowledge, leading to general understanding. The sum of scientific knowledge is a conception of reality, to compare to the conception of reality proposed by ideology. — karl stone

What is a "higher" epistemic standard? How can one compare standards? This is not a rhetorical question, by the way -- it goes to the core of the problem. (And asking it does not make the asker a relativist ;)).

I'll give you my answer: a higher epistemic standard (using "higher" in this normative sense that you are apparently defending) is one that calls our attention to the fundamental link between knowledge and (individual) experience. There is no knowledge without a knower, and a higher epistemic standard is one which tests a given proposition (offered as "knowledge") against the conditions of knowledge: personal experience, logic, rational articulation (among others).

Methodically, science is a way of thinking - demonstrated to establish reliable knowledge, leading to general understanding. The sum of scientific knowledge is a conception of reality, to compare to the conception of reality proposed by ideology. — karl stone

That is more utopian than actual. But even if we restrict the discussion to the natural sciences (the paragraph above becomes strained to the point of absurdity if we include many fields which are called "science" nowadays), it must not be forgotten that science works so well by excluding information from the field of inquiry. In order to develop a law of gravitation, we had to exclude all kinds of information from the actual experience and observation of falling bodies. (Indeed, Newton excluded better than Aristotle -- no slouch scientist, he -- which is why Newtonian gravitation is better science than Aristotelian gravitation). Science works by a severe shaving off of the (literally) infinite pool of "possible data", so as to focus on "relevant data" -- and the criteria of relevance is not a given in science. It comes from the input of the scientist as a rational observer. (In other words, we cannot do science by pure algorithm -- some criteria of relevance must be added beforehand to the mix).

I would argue, that to maintain ideological conceptions of reality, the scientific conception of reality has been suppressed, downplayed and ignored, to our enormous detriment. — karl stone

This downplays the immense difficulty of developing what you call the scientific conception of reality in the first place. It is not a given. It was achieved through hard work, expanded throughout generations. And it is not accessible to anyone without a proportionate effort. In other words, it is not easy to maintain a scientific outlook; it is not natural for human beings to do it. It is feasible, of course, but it is not intuitive.

It is not necessary to downplay anything if one wants to avoid a scientific outlook; all that is required for that is the direction of one's energies to other goals than that of achieving universalizable, replicable knowledge.

(I think your argument could use more explicit definitions of science and ideology, incidentally).

By the same principle, acting upon (not from) a scientific conception of reality will manifest a functionality in the real world - that follows from a truthful relation between the knowledge bases of action and reality. It is a lever - a key, a means of organisation with the potential for massive benefits - and in face of dire need. — karl stone

Well said.

Nonetheless, there are other things between heaven and earth than science x ideology.

So you're with the 'there is no truth' squad - that band of people who undermine any scientific claim to authority with subjectivist and metaphysical relativism? The fact you're ignoring is that science works; it establishes generalized principles that can be applied over and over, and produce reliably valid results because the principle is true of some facet of reality. From the accumulation of true principles, over the past 50 years particularly, a highly coherent picture of reality has emerged - and it's that scientific picture of reality we need to take into account where necessary and appropriate to do so.

To answer your opening question, no, I am not.

As for your other comments, they are not related to anything I said.

"Science" (which is pretty much amorphous these days) is not an epistemic standard. Science is a method (i.e., a way). Epistemic standards are presuppositions of science, but for that reason they are not to be confused with the theory and practice of scientists (which depend on those standards).

Empiricism is indeed a maior fallacy (exposed by Plato, not surprisingly).

A good graduate school thesis would be "how did Western Philosophy graduate from the idealism of Plato to the realism of British Empiricism?" — hks

By not reading Plato. There's your answer in one sentence.

Oh Popper, where are thou?

I would not waste my time on Plato. — hks

Indeed. But you waste your time in replying to a thread about Plato, even though you didn't waste your time with his works.

Fascinating, as Spock would say.

Plato's system of Philosophy has many fallacies which a novice would probably not be able to recognize. That's why Plato is hazardous as a starting point. — hks

Plato has no system of philosophy, and wrote quite a bit against such constructs.

Have you ever read a competent introduction on Plato?

Try Paul Friedländer.

The Republic is not excusively -- or even mainly! -- about government theory. But any good intro about it will tell you that.

There's no better place to start than the Apology of Socrates. Then try the short dialogues about the death of Socrates (especially Euthyphro and Crito -- Phaedo is not so simple).

After this, I would recommend the Symposion (though you should probably reread the Symposion after reading some other dialogues, it will broaden your view of it).

Only after this I would suggest the Republic -- and preferrably with a good instructor, good videos, a good guide, or something of that sort. The Republic is hard, and many world-famous thinkers (hey, Popper) have no clue about it even after reading it and writing books about it.

My two cents :).

That 'if' is my point. — BrianW

If (or perhaps when, to prevent a new riff on if) you read the rest of my post, you'll see that your point has no point.

Perhaps I should bite.

But how can I be sure that you are a fellow human being rather than a bot that will only waste my time?

Perhaps if you defined what you are through some assemblage of words, it would help.

Then again, how could this be of any use?

If you want to behold a mystical experience, leave the room where your (say, 10-months old) baby is playing, and look at her face when you return.

What happens in her psyche is the influx of extrinsic, overwhelming joy. The result in her behavior is to be overcome with laughter. Any mystical experience is similar to this. And the notion that there is a difference of kind (perhaps involving distinctions such as natural vs. supernatural) between the various instances of mystical experiences is a confusion between causes and effects. The experience is the same (or very similar), regardless of what is causing it.

I think you are overthinking this. The issue is not meaningfulness or veridicality. The issue is whatever it is that we use to distinguish between hallucination and non-hallucination. Call it "X" if you prefer. The simple fact is that we don't have ordinary problems in making this distinction. Even borderline cases (e.g. phantom limbs) can be distinguished by all involved (including the subject of the hallucination), rather easily in practice.

...what makes the experience of something not real? — Blue Lux

Nothing. The issue is not one of "real x not-real" either. Experiences are real, period. (Else they are not experiences at all). The referent of an experience may be real or not -- we can think about our mother or about Frodo Baggins. The experience of thinking will be real, but the referent of the thinking will be fictional in one case, factual in the other.

And, I guess the bigger question is, is a thought existent? Does an abstract or phenomenal object exist? Is there a being of such an object? — Blue Lux

Well, our thoughts are (all of them) existent. But the thought of, say, Sherlock Holmes is fictional (since he is fictional). We can recreate Holmes' thoughts in our own mind by reading a book, but it will be our recreation of a (fictional) thought, it will not be "Holmes' thoughts". We can discuss what is the kind of existence that thoughts have. It need not be a binary, black-and-white property. Thoughts have existence in a different mode than rocks; they exist more as processes than as static entities. But processes exist in a bona fide manner, although dynamically rather than statically. (Of course, a rock is merely a slow process, slow enough for us to treat it statically; but this is not the core of our discussion)

An abstract object, pretty much by the definition of "abstract" (which means, "extracted from"), does not exist. It was abstracted from something which did exist, but it did not exist before some mind abstracted it (or it would not have been necessary to abstract it in the first place). The universal property that was extracted from a series of observations does not exist, even though each instance exists. So, dogs exist, but dogness does not. We cannot distinguish between imaginary and non-imaginary (or, hallucinatory, or, dream) dogness. But we can distinguish between imaginary and non-imaginary dogs.

However, there is something which is common to dogs which we use to identify them; in other words, there is dogness, even though it does not exist. This, in a nutshell, is the distinction between being and existence. There is a being of dogness, but there is no existence of dogness. And the criteria for defining whether X has "being but not existence" or "being and existence" -- there cannot be something which has existence but not being, since existence is a subset of being -- is the imagination/hallucination test. What this test identifies is the possibility of presence, which is, as indicated earlier, the "perception of existence" that we humans deal with in our everyday lives. (This becomes more and more circular as we dive into thinking about it rather than experiencing it first-hand, and no wonder. Thought is not the dominant property here, and to think otherwise is a path that leads us nowhere).

No disagreement there. Meaningfulness does not run across these lines. And notice that drug-induced experiences were singled out in my first comment about this subject. The point here is that the dinstiction between existent and non-existent is very, very, very often a clear one. Even prophetic experiences (which are, by definition, the epitome of meaningfulness) are not confused by the subject with ordinary ones.

Well, I can generally differentiate dream and awake when I wake up (☕ time). — jorndoe

If this is true, then this is not:

The "being" versus "existence" thing just seems to add confusion. — jorndoe

Husserl would disagree with you. — Blue Lux

Perhaps he would, but not on the strength of what followed in your post, which basically reinforced my point. (Incidentally, Husserl is part of what informed my views about this).

If "the intentional content of a hallucination or dream is absolutely indistinguishable in its being from the intentional content of any experience", but we distinguish ordinary experience from hallucinations and dreams without any difficulty, there must be something not derived from the intentional content which allows us to do it. This is what I called "presence". But the name is just a label and does little more than to give us a handy tool to refer to it. What matters is that we can distinguish them, and this requires some distinction between the objects of consciousness (which, as Husserl said, is not derived from their intentional content), as well as some property in the subject of experience that is attuned to this distinction.

how do you distinguish the being of numbers and napolean as nonexistent from the being of existing beings? What makes a being exist? — Blue Lux

We have a non-sensorial property that allows us to distinguish between dream and non-dream, between hallucination and non-hallucination. (Even if there are borderline cases, perhaps drug-induced, the principle is sound and the property serves us in the vast, vast majority of cases).

The same property is at work in distinguishing between existence and non-existence of beings.

If I had to give a name to this property, I would call it "awareness". And the thing that it is aware of is "presence".

There are types of beings?

Sure, just as there are dreams and non-dreams, etc.

What makes something exist?

Here we go into the terrain of cosmological arguments. What makes something exist is always some pre-existing thing. (This is analogous, but not identical, to Aristotle's argument about act, potency, and the prime mover; but this argument is nothing but a roundabout way to provide an unnecessary justification to the property of awareness).

Are there types of existences?
Is the not a whole, universal here?

Why would these two sentences not be complementary rather than opposed? The universe (taken as the Parmenidean Being) can be one and whole, and still there can be types of existences within it.

I didn't point to non-dual being. I pointed to non-duality. Being is relative to not being and a duality. — praxis

You speak of non-duality, I put "being" in quotation marks to indicate that I was not talking about being (or, dual being).

Your following comments are apophatic in nature (and I agree with them taken in that context).

The language we use is indeed based in duality, but it can be used to point at non-dual "being". (In fact, we both just did precisely that). This is why theology (theos-logos, the discourse about the gods) must, of necessity, use symbolism and myth (as Plato pointed out), rather than direct speech.

The Parmenidean poem that you mentioned talked about two realities, which to me sounded similar if not identical to the ‘two truth’ in Eastern philosophy — praxis

While calling one of them "Being" and the other "Opinion". Or, "Truth" and "Lie". In any way, one of them is (quoted from http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm) "a wholly untrustworthy path". They are not comparable, and they really should not be called, indistinctly, "realities" without putting into doubt Parmenides' entire argument.

I’m curious if it makes sense to you to distinguish something supernatural or beyond objects of empirical cognition as being in one or the other of these realities. It doesn’t appear reasonable to believe that “something” exists in the Parmenidean One. — praxis

No, I don't think it makes sense to conceptualize the Parmenidean distinction as one between "natural" and "supernatural". I brought up Parmenides to help illustrate what Being is, in the classical philosophical tradition. (If you want my opinion about this subject -- which is not quite on-thread -- I think Aristotle basically nailed it with the act-potency distinction)

.

What do you mean? — Blue Lux

Nothing esoteric. What exists is a (quite small) subset of being. Consider: Napoleon does not exist. Star Trek does not exist. Tomorrow does not exist. Numbers do not exist. Yet, all of them "are" in very important senses, and they have actual, measurable effects in what exists.

Same goes for facts/truth, although not in a direct relationship. Napoleon is (was) a fact -- or perhaps the best way to phrase it would be "Napoleon's existence, complete with birth and death, is a fact". The events depicted in Star Trek are not facts (yet?). Numbers will never be facts. But we can state truths about all of these entities, and these truths can generate new facts.

How do we know that what you're calling God is not a being among other beings of the same kind? — praxis

Not through experience. There are reasonings that take us from the experience of a God (or, to be more precise, the experience of Being -- or, to be even more precise, the experience of Be! -- which is the best translation of the central term in the Parmenidean poem, which is probably the best and earliest philosophical expression of that experience) to the conclusion that there is only one God (or, Being, etc. Use "X" if the word "God" hampers the argument). But these are reasonings, not experiences. And, being reasonings, they hinge upon certain axioms of faith (non-contradiction, validity of deduction, etc.) which are already "once removed" from the immediacy of experience and which are therefore already risking error.

But regardless of the possibility of error when specifying only one Being, that's the answer to your question.

It’s necessary to use language to talk about things regardless if we’ve experienced them ourselves. — praxis

That is either a tautology or a confusion. The tautology results if we focus on the word "talk", which clearly requires language. But if we look at the core of your statement (replacing "talk" with, say, "communicate" -- animals can communicate without language, at least without "formal language as we usually refer to by that name"), then it is not quite correct and depends on a confusion. Communication is from A to B: A communicates something to B. If there is an intermediary (say, A gives a note to C and asks him to take the note to B), the intermediary is not really communicating anything. He is an instrument. And he/it can be an object (e.g. phones) without any awareness of what is being communicated.

There is a similar process at hand when someone simply repeats words that he read in a book without a reenactment of the experience underlying those words. Anyone can look at John 4:8 and say "God is Love". But no one can communicate that God is Love if he did not experience the relationship of identity between God and Love that is the core of the passage of John's letter. This is not restricted to religion, obviously. "We the people hold these truths to be self-evident", "Property is theft", "the greatest generation", etc., are all examples of symbols that can (and very frequently do) easily become vacuous if the underlying experience is not present in the speaker.

In this more precise sense, it is impossible to communicate something which you have not experienced.

And, to circle back to your statement, our experience is always inarticulate before it is articulate. The struggle of finding the right words to express what you are experience is familiar to anyone (probably on a daily basis). The articulation of our experiences always go through the use of similes, metaphors, analogies, etc., proceeding from the known in an attempt to indicate the (to the listener -- or to ourselves in an internal dialogue) unknown.

God and other supernatural experiences are a special case, by definition, since the word "supernatural" means precisely something beyond the objects of empirical cognition. And so any language describing the supernatural (or even the unnatural -- e.g. ghosts) will, necessarily, be tentative and require an enormous amount of charity and active participation on the part of the listener, or the communication will simply fail.

We can have knowledge of things beyond our experience with language... — praxis

No, not really. Language is not magical. The word "God" does not convey the experience of God, just as the word "dog" does not convey the experience of dogness. (Remember there are many languages). The role of language is not the transmission of knowledge; knowledge is always subjective and must be recreated by the listener. Language is more like a map or a recipe. It describes a path which, in the speaker, led to an experience of type X. The listener, if willing, can attempt to follow that path, reenacting the steps, and -- perhaps -- recreating the experience. But he can also refuse. Or misunderstand. Or lack the willpower. Or lack the training to follow the path. Etc. The important thing to observe is that language, by itself, does not convey knowledge -- words are not bottled meaning.

but unless there’s some other realm that we may somehow have access to, everything, including numbers, which you say do not exist as ordinary objects do, is derived from worldly experience. — praxis

I would agree completely if you took out the word "worldly", which seems to be superfluous at best, or erroneous at worst. What is its role in this sentence? What is "worldly" about, for instance, the efforts that 4-6 year old kids to to grasp the nature of the natural numbers?

Well, at least you can't complain that I am not using a single meaning for the word "Being". Can you imagine how frustrating would that be?

Meanwhile, a few days ago...

For some weird reason, you seem to have gotten it into your head that I must set a single meaning for the word "dog" and tell you what it is with regards to what I've said. — S

Why can't you just tell me what it means? — S

https://www.google.com.br/search?client=opera&q=difference+between+being+and+existence&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

This is the first significant link in that search:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Being_and_Existence

It looks credible and balanced. Take it from there.