On the contrary, I read the entire list and don’t feel that I know you any better. — praxis
One of the most influential of Alan Watts's early works, The Supreme Identity examines the reality of civilization's deteriorated spiritual state and offers solutions through a rigorous theological dialectic between Eastern metaphysic and Christian theology. By interpreting neglected or overlooked aspects of key issues in philosophical theology, Watts challenges readers to reassess the gist of religions that before seemed so familiar, and to perceive Vedantic "oneness" (or union) as 'the ground of all things'. In addressing how religious institutions have failed to provide the wisdom or power necessary to cope with the condition of modernity, Watts instead seeks the truth of the human existence and its relationship to the divine continuum in terms taken from the perennial traditions of Platonist Christianity, Hindu Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism.
In an eye-opening account of "metaphysical blindness" in the West, Watts accents this dense exploration of religious philosophy with wry wit that will engage inquiring minds in search of spiritual power and wisdom.
Love your list. Shame we're so geographically remote, it makes me want to meet you. (re 23 - my mnemonic for the colors spectrum was 'rotten old yacs go better in velvet'. I used to have one for the TCP stack but now I've forgotten it. 24 - never been admitted to hospital ; also remember my childhood phone-number, which, quaintly, in my neck of the woods, was alpha-numeric in the early 60's and began with 'JF'. this is my favourite song. Hands up who knows the bass player.) — Wayfarer
To the contrary, I think what I've provided gives a much better understanding of who I am and what my life means to me than any narrative could. I guess that's the point. Narratives round off corners and putty over holes. Sand rough spots. — T Clark
To the contrary, I think what I've provided gives a much better understanding of who I am and what my life means to me than any narrative could. I guess that's the point. Narratives round off corners and putty over holes. Sand rough spots. — T Clark
I think that just shows a lack of imagination, vision, on your part. Seeing people as they are is a skill not everyone has. — T Clark
This response tells me much more about you than all those details. Some details are more significant than others, I think you might agree. — praxis
Only if the conflict thesis is fundamentally true. — Wayfarer
But who am I now? What treasure (or sword) can I bring? — syntax
Probably the most important part of our worldview is our categorization of others. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? If the environment is understood as the most pressing issue, then environmental activists are central good guys. If the world has become a spiritual flatland, then resuscitators or keepers of the holy flame are central. If superstition is the problem, then defenders of science and rigor are the good guys. A diagnosis tends to come with a doctor. Even a cynic wants to cure at least himself of bothersome illusions. Other self-concerned philosophers of their own worry or fear or pettiness. (And I'm playing at being a knight of self-consciousness, one might say.) — syntax
It's a charming list, but does your childhood phone number really give us a better understanding of you? I remember my childhood phone-number, too. It has a certain magic for me. But it's just random numbers for others. — syntax
I have to agree with praxis here, T Clark. In your response you seem to divide humanity into those with the skill of seeing people and those without. For me it's pretty natural to assume the purveyor of invidious distinctions find himself or herself on the bright side of that distinction. For what it's worth, I value seeing others. I count it as a virtue, so I'm definitely not attacking your distinction. I'm just defending my thesis. — syntax
Probably the most important part of our worldview is our categorization of others. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? — syntax
A central feature of a worldview is: who is in charge, and why should we accept their authority? — frank
Modern mass cynics lose their individual sting and refrain from the risk of letting themselves be put on display. They have long since ceased to expose themselves as eccentrics to the attention and mockery of others. The person with the clear, "evil gaze" has disappeared into the crowd; anonymity now becomes the domain for cynical deviation. Modern cynics are integrated, asocial characters who, on the score of subliminal illusionlessness, are a match for any hippie. They do not see their clear, evil gaze as a personal defect or an amoral quirk that needs to be privately justified. Instinctively, they no longer understand their way of existing as something that has to do with being evil, but as participation in a collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things. — Sloterdijk
Life thins out into a veneer over the possibility of revolution, and so the whole world is sick, but the bad guy is untouchable.
What do you think of the government-type you live under? Do you see in any beauty in its foundation? — frank
It's not the number, it's the fact that I remembered it. That I thought it was worth putting on the list. That I thought to write the list in the first place. That I think the list and the things on it show something fundamental about me.
If nothing else, I think we have established I am charming. — T Clark
Keeping in mind you and I don't seem to agree on exactly what a worldview is, no, I don't think categorizing people is an important part of a world view, certainly not mine. I work hard, with some, intermittent, success, not to characterize people at all. — T Clark
Whatever my metanarratively-woven identity is, it definitely includes joy at seeing Sloterdijk brought into the convo. Best thinker out there, in my opinion [what am I signalling?] — csalisbury
What I want to say, cribbing Sloterdijk's terminology, is that there are a plurality of spheres in which we live. In the public sphere ( our job etc) - our particular identity and metanarrative is less important. Like you've said, we kinda all agree on this neutral background that lets us function. Our particular sense of self is present, but muted. On forums like this (or in real-world friendships) they become much more pronounced. In our private lives - if we write, or journal, or even just think - these things became super-present.
But there's another sphere, intimacy, where all this kind of breaks down. (Intimacy comes in all sorts of varieties, I'm not just talking relationships).
I say this, and I think its mostly right, but I think its also not quite right. I'm paving over something — csalisbury
I understand the goal of wanting to re-spiritualize the corrosive Western knowledge-is-power paradigm, but I'm anything but sure that this can be done. — syntax
Some identifications are so lightly held that it doesn't hurt to reverse them completely. Others are so deep and 'natural' that they are invisible. They are too close to the 'eye.' As I see it, one way to be a great philosopher or exciting thinker is to become aware of these deep/'natural'/invisible parts of a worldview and simultaneously make them both explicit and optional. — syntax
The cynic still has hope. That's what the angst is really about. Abandon all hope and there's nothing to be cynical about. The world doesn't need to be saved. — frank
It's not a political programme - it's a philosophical question.
I think philosophy was originally about the realisation of a higher identity - hence the reference to Watts' book. But this is now bracketed out, for sounding too much like religion. The culture has been more or less inoculated against any such understanding, at least in part by what it conceives of as religion. And I agree - culture has indeed become entirely focussed on money, glamour, technological power, pursuit of pleasure. But it's the job of philosophy to criticize that, or at least be aware of it. — Wayfarer
Agree. Being aware of your pre-suppositions is a difficult thing to do. But that's one of Kant's great strengths, IMO. — Wayfarer
I love the guy too, though I'm just really getting around to him. I recognize immediately, though, the kind of intellectual I like. This dude is present, relevant. So many thinkers are just snore-worthy, ignoring the forest for this or that tree.
For instance, how many men who read the famous thinkers for pleasure can nevertheless find themselves entangled with women who don't really have a comparable appetite for abstraction? Or for cynicism or demystification? It may be that these women do our believing for us. And we do their doubting for them. — syntax
this arrogance seems inseparable from real philosophy for me. — syntax
To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact. When the fact broke through the incognito he would leave suddenly the seaport where he happened to be at the time and go to another—generally farther east. He kept to seaports because he was a seaman in exile from the sea, and had Ability in the abstract, which is good for no other work but that of a water-clerk. He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but inevitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from seaports and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty, added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim. — Conrad
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