It is likely that wondering and the sense of mysteries led to most of the developments in civilisation, not just philosophy and religion, but the emergence of the arts and sciences. — Jack Cummins
I am inclined to think it acts as a general motivational factor in leading people to unique and creative solutions to all kinds of problems. — Jack Cummins
The underlying source of consciousness seems to me to be mysterious, or awesome, whether we call it God or refer to it in any other terminology. I am just surprised that some people don't see this as a mystery, or mysterious at all. — Jack Cummins
The question of the existence of God is not solely about determining an answer, but about establishing rapport, creating dialogue, and ultimately creating shared meanings which can then have actual influences in the lives of individuals and thereby an impact on our collective and shared existence (culture). Likewise for all of the other mysteries you cite.
So, in effect, to pursue these questions is to answer them. — Pantagruel
the way he saw it was of how it is possible to assemble the parts we find helpful from various belief systems.
After that conversation, I was wondering whether we are in the position of doing that in our current time and to what extent does that work? Does it mean that we choose what we like and reject the rest? — Jack Cummins
The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subjects to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. — Tom Jefferson
That last line is the point. I imagine Jefferson making it easier to swallow as he leads up to it.
I think of this as our meta-religion, a kind of civic religion that governs private religion. All 'decent' and 'reasonable' people (roughly by definition) have to give other reasonable and decent people the space and freedom to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling or (hopefully) 'gradients of bliss.' The devil is in the political details, but we can ignore them for the moment.
I think that the whole way we approach the big questions must be so different from when people spent their lives embracing one shared worldview. — Jack Cummins
https://wmpeople.wm.edu/asset/index/cvance/sartreMan is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. — S
I can see your point of view, but I am not sure that the three big philosophy questions can just be neatly swept away, after all the centuries of discussion. — Jack Cummins
You ask me if I know Sartre. Strangely, I just began reading 'Being and Nothingness' this week. I am finding it hard work really. — Jack Cummins
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_SartreFor the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions. — Nausea
I think really one of the worst forms of nothingness I would see is if there is no life after death. I do think that this life is worth focusing upon, but it just seems that for some people that there is so much pain and suffering. If that is all there is, that seems so sad. However, I also see the possibility of extinction of humanity as an even worse form of nothingness, far worse than the thought of my own death. — Jack Cummins
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.
A biological species is both identical with and distinct from the individual organisms that make it up. The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed. Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself (i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of infinite Spirit.
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Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves. They would then be in a position to recognize that, while “the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet” (GTU 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is
a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification, enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (GTU 357/137) — link
There is so little consensus in shared ideas and so much fragmentation — Jack Cummins
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