So perhaps the real issue is the concept of rationality — j0e
Esotericism is associated, rightly or wrongly, with personal authority — j0e
Socrates is a complex figure — j0e
Just because we don’t have it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. So that is rather like an argument from ignorance. — Wayfarer
I hasten to add, I don’t claim to possess such an insight either - but I don’t recoil from the possibility that Plato understood things that I cannot. — Wayfarer
To ‘reach what is free from hypothesis’ I would take to be the direct apprehension of the forms. — Wayfarer
That excerpt we discussed the other day: — Wayfarer
Right. But, roughly, a proposition and a jazz performance aren't false in the same way. 'True' and 'false' seem to me just as flexible as 'real.' For me the take-home is something like: there's no substitute for (linguistic) skill. It's like reacting to the total context when driving. — j0e
This sounds like you want to sell the idea that esoteric knowledge isn't something one acquires via rational inquiry - the clarifications of definitions, the rigorous application of logic - and that there's another route to it which either bypasses rationality or might even violate its core principles. If such is true then sure sages have what is an exclusive monopoly over esoteric truths; after all, to someone like you or me who are what sages might refer to as "uninitiated" (into the ranks of the chosen) the radically different approaches/techniques/methods employed therein would be so alien to us that we would find it extremely difficult if not impossible to get a handle on what sages consider true knowledge or real wisdom. — TheMadFool
This sounds like you want to sell the idea that esoteric knowledge isn't something one acquires via rational inquiry - the clarifications of definitions, the rigorous application of logic - and that there's another route to it which either bypasses rationality or might even violate its core principles. — TheMadFool
That does not mean that I would accept a mysticism that is read into the text as something found in the text. — Fooloso4
OK, but you've just ignored or neglected my points about language. — j0e
Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? — Witt
The sage, then, does not know any determinate truth about life after death or before birth, — Janus
The philosophical way of living is necessarily rational, in the sense of 'measured" or "balanced" but not in the sense of being able to be gained merely by rational discourse, by merely being instructed in how to do it. — Janus
For Hadot, famously, the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84). Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done (Nussbaum 1996, 353-4; Cooper 2010). Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions (6a), are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” They also utilize rhetoric and imagination in order “to formulate the rule of life to ourselves in the most striking and concrete way” and aim to actively re-habituate bodily passions, impulses, and desires (as for instance, in Cynic or Stoic practices, abstinence is used to accustom followers to bear cold, heat, hunger, and other privations) (PWL 85). These practices were used in the ancient schools in the context of specific forms of interpersonal relationships: for example, the relationship between the student and a master, whose role it was to guide and assist the student in the examination of conscience, in identification and rectification of erroneous judgments and bad actions, and in the conduct of dialectical exchanges on established themes.
Take a determinate proposition - say, a recipe or a formula, which communicates a specific piece of information. This proposition can be represented in any one of a number of languages, and in any one of a number of media. For instance, it could be written in various languages, or encoded in binary and digitized, or written on a piece of paper. In all of those cases, the physical form of the representation is different, but the information remains the same. Ergo, the idea itself is not physical, only the representation is physical. — Wayfarer
That is an ability that is logically prior (not temporally, but logically prior) to any science. — Wayfarer
The 'mystical Plato' is perfectly at home in later Christian mysticism, where Platonism played a seminal role, — Wayfarer
We have the skill to judge these the same (same enough) — j0e
The conflation of the works of Plato and Platonism is a fundamental mistake. — Fooloso4
The images of knowledge in the Republic are his exoteric teaching cleverly disguised as an esoteric teaching. — Fooloso4
I too once believed that the ascent from the cave and the power of dialectic was a description of the mystical experience of truth. I no longer see things that way. — Fooloso4
Plato, like Socrates before him was a zetetic skeptic, that is, one who seeks and inquires, driven and guided by his knowledge of his ignorance — Fooloso4
This is an element that Kojeve accounts for in his notion of the sage....that the sage cannot arrive until the culture that makes him possible develops historically in a world of work and war. — j0e
Shaping arrows is a skill. Reasoning is an ability which can be used to greater or lesser extent but without that ability, there is no way to develop it. — Wayfarer
I wonder if he had engaged with Jasper's idea of the 'axial age' and the purported appearance of many of the seminal wisdom traditions (and sages!) all within a few centuries of each other. — Wayfarer
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alexandre_Koj%C3%A8vePrior to going to France, Kojève studied under the existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers, submitting his doctoral dissertation on the Russian mystic Vladimir Soloviev's views on the mystical union of God and man in Christ. — link
https://www.voegelin-principles.eu/history-progress-or-reversal-mythical-prognostications-kojeve-and-mcluhanNote that Kojève was not denying that at one time in history religion had served a critical purpose. Christianity, in particular, was the first universal religion that came closest to bringing about true self-consciousness by teaching that all human beings are equal as well as finite: “the whole evolution of the Christian world is nothing but a progress toward the atheistic awareness of the essential finiteness of human existence.”The Christian faith was the first religion to discover the spirituality of man as free, individual, and historical. This synthesis of the particular and universal as well as the related recognition of theology as anthropology, became possible only in the form of Christian individuality, Christ as man-God. Yet this religious consciousness lacks true (or political) wisdom. The particular problem is that the religious man thinks that God, not the State, is universal and homogeneous at any time in history. Hence he erroneously believes that he can attain absolute knowledge at any historical moment whatsoever, whereas he can only attain the State (not God), and only at the End of History.Unbeknownst to the religious man, only the universal homogeneous state, the final achievement of equality for all on earth, realizes the Christian ideal of charity (love of all human beings as one would love God) — link
As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure.
The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure.
but I'm interested in the idea of 'the nature of reason' as it was understood in pre-modern philosophy. That's something I think has been lost in transition to modernity. And that's because, in the modern view, 'reason' is subjectivized, relativized and immanentized - it is no longer seen as an animating principle, but as an instrumental faculty. — Wayfarer
The sage, then, does not know any determinate truth about life after death or before birth, the workings of Karma, the mind of God, or Douglas Adam's "the secret to life, the universe and everything", they just know how to live, how to be themselves without fear, and interact with people without fear or favour, but general love and compassion instead, and so on.
The esoteric knowledge is akin to Aristotle's "phronesis" and "eudamonia" and the skeptic's "ataraxia", and not to some kind of quasi-scientific metaphysical knowledge about the nature of reality. It is not the gaining of something so much as the loss of the ego-based angst and alienation which is such a prominent feature of the life of the ego.
Also their knowledge is a "poesis", a "making", and thus akin to poetry. — Janus
We're not 'back' in it, we're trapped in it, and the task of philosophy is not to appease the machine, but to see through it. — Wayfarer
My understanding is that your position is opposed to this vision of dead, apathetic nature. — j0e
If you look at philosophy in the old tradition, it was indeed a cure or a therapy for mistaken belief or cognition, for attaching significance to the wrong things. — Wayfarer
But because that kind of sentiment is easily associated with religion then it's rejected on those grounds - guilt by association, so to speak, as Pierre Hadot notes. — Wayfarer
There's a sense of something missing, both in myself and in the culture. — Wayfarer
it is the only composition of mine to have been regularly performed in public, during the 1990's. — Wayfarer
I think science is inherently predictive (repeatability being such a key part of the scientific method) but accidentally in service of control. — csalisbury
To 'naturalize' esotericism would be to take it as myths and metaphors. To the degree that cognition is intrinsically metaphorical and that metaphor does the heavy lifting in the works of the great philosophers, there's no sharp boundary between the esoteric and the rational. The vague boundary is more a matter of a second-order willingness to assimilate critics' objections. Consider that Witt wants to show the fly the way our of the bottle, which is like Plato showing fools the way out of the cave. The core principles of rationality (in my view) don't exclude myths and metaphor but only an anti-social refusal to recognize and respond to criticism. — j0e
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.