Otto Weininger on MTV

[Talking Ass]

Jupi, it is not that Cory interprets Wieninger differently, though I suppose that is true, but rather that I desire to point in the direction of creative thinking, creative spiritual and emotional contact with 'texts', with ideas, that we can and should all be doing, as I see it. I think there is a major major downside of proposing Absolutisms: it leads to slavish devotion to this 'Absolute', to the establishment of 'correct' ways of seeing and viewing, to intellectual work that begins to look like little more than 'sharing agreements', and even to minor personality cults. Despite the fact that Cory may explode at any moment, it is still rather impressive and also interesting to observe the 'productions' of freer forms of thinking. Isn't this desirable in your view? And if not, what is?

The beginning of a cure for this condition of slavish devotion: rebellion.

[jupiviv]

I desire to point in the direction of creative thinking, creative spiritual and emotional contact with 'texts'

I've no problem with creative thinking, as long as it's not based on delusion(which is probably what you mean by it), but 'emotional contact'? It's this "emotional contact" with texts that's led to the distortion of every almost all the great spiritual texts of mankind. It leads us either to blind fundamentalism or hazy-eyed secularism.

I think there is a major major downside of proposing Absolutisms: it leads to slavish devotion to this 'Absolute', to the establishment of 'correct' ways of seeing and viewing, to intellectual work that begins to look like little more than 'sharing agreements', and even to minor personality cults.

Actually it leads away from all that. You, like that other member guestoflogic, simply refuse to even understand a position that is totally against your own position - which at this point seems to me to be that there can be many such 'positions' as long as they include Judeo-Christianity in a way that does not reject other such positions, emotions and the freedom to think as illogically as one wishes to.

You don't even know what the "absolute" is, or rather what I or anyone else here mean by it - you have never sincerely inquired, perhaps because you are prejudiced, as it were, by the little that you do understand about it. Instead all you can do is create a 'QRS' religion/ideology and its ideologues in that space in your mind which is left blank by the actual words and their meanings. And apparently you've been doing this for some years...

[jupiviv]

And right on cue, the mother type rushes to protect her boys from a healthy tussel!

My own now revised psychoanalytical theory would be more in the lines of the Duchesne persona having parental issues inside a complex triangle of masculinity: Kevin seen by you for some reason as motherly type ("gentle", "love for folk" "in-tune", "no angry") while David was the distant father ("possessive", analytical, undiplomatic, angry-dad). And now you have to kill dad before you can stand alone, take his place and get Kevin... it's understandable. :-)

I think he sees David as an older brother who is more loved by Mother Kevin despite his crudeness and harsh masculinity, thereby incurring the jealousy of the more refined and effeminate younger sibling(Cory.)

[Liberty Sea]

Well, this discussion is embarrassing. Simply embarrassing.

[Talking Ass]

Jupi, it is true that there exist irreconcilable differences between 'my' point of view and 'yours'.

It might help you to understand that my role is as a sort of symbiote. I see and hear things (those facts and assembled facts that are our thinking) and let them act on me and in me. It seems that the main difference is that I have a BODY and I live in a physical world. The world of 'flesh'. I can only be everything that is that 'world' and in this sense my 'allegiance', or the starting and resolving point of my allegiance, is to that messy, confused, tragical group of ideas and facts that is the human world.

So, with that 'in mind' I tend to see 'your' abstractions and pretentions as a rather childish game of avoidance. Of reality. Of self. Of your own absurdity. Of everything about 'us' which as Liberty Sea says is 'just embarrassing' (and I mean this in the overall human sense and not because Cory made reference to homosexuality and all the odd ideas that spin off from that in respect to a male-oriented philosophical forum...), I honestly think one is better off in initiating a conversation---almost any conversation---from a platform of self-understanding and honesty. I suggest that one cannot do that when one has in oneself elevated abstractions into an unreal domain. It takes the idea of 'language-game' into regions of abstract absurdity.

If "one's aim in philosophy ... is to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle", I would take this to mean that we can't really know ourself or our condition 1) if we are tethered to false-abstract thinking and 2) unless we really have a sense of 'where' we are located. When we can and do, then a conversation begins. I do not think that 'you' have ever really 'located yourself' truthfully. And from that dubious position it follows that the productions of that assemblage of facts will lead...to dubious states, declarations and actions.

As a symbiote, as a fellow-fly if you wish, this is a large part of what I take away from these conversations. But it is not the 'truth' that you wish people to take away! I am a devious fly, then. There is a branch of philosophy that examines everything unvalued and discarded be a culture and brings it around again for examination and consideration: reevaluation. To be quite respectfully truthful with 'you', I have become far more interested in what 'you' discard and depricate than in what you 'value'. It has become almost a reflex---quite like a fly perhaps.

Now, this does not mean that I intend to get a pink 'Hello Kitty' cellphone and I certainly do agree that there is such a thing as the inane and all manner of ideas, thoughts, sentiments and activities that are wasteful and stupid. But I hold to the position that it is 'all of this' (this human problem in the widest and most tragic sense) that 'we' have to hold to. If there is a Work, it is a work of working with and within that reality. It is in this sense that I refer to certain [I think] powerful ideas that one finds in Judeo-Christian expression. But again, even within those traditions and ideas, I am inclined to focus on all those parts of them that 'you' undervalue and dismiss. [Historicity, temporality, specificity, contextuality].

The mind and the 'heart' are part of one unity. Rational thinking and one's own emotive self...is the 'area' in which 'we' have our existence. In any case, it is 'here' that we have to exist and to work. It is folly not to start from this premise and it is folly to divide ourselves in the way that 'you' do. Really, this is so very simple that only a group of high-octane and real geniuses don't seem to 'geddit'.

I have expressed myself here I think cogently and clearly. It is not an 'irrational position' it is just that it [seems to] operate from different predicates. Still I would SO MUCH like to have you tell me about this Absolute and the 'use of the absolute'. Perhaps you can help me... ;-)

They say 'to help a man out of a pit you have to be willing to get a little muddy' but there is the danger of merely getting sucked down into the pit. Similarly, to help a fly escape from a fly-bottle you might have to get into the fly-bottle. There is a danger that you might just end up a fly!

[Diebert van Rhijn]

It might help you to understand that my role is as a sort of symbiote. I see and hear things (those facts and assembled facts that are our thinking) and let them act on me and in me. It seems that the main difference is that I have a BODY and I live in a physical world.

You mean like this?

[Talking Ass]

No, because that is a parasite, or looks like one in any case. I envision something like industrial symbiosis. In this sense, 'you' are some sort of corrosive compound or by-product that, when transferred through my system, can become useful.

[jupiviv]

@Alex, so it all comes back to your utter lack of understanding of the "Absolute", and your opposition to our ideas simply because you cannot question your own. When I first read your posts, I was of the opinion that you were incapable of understanding anything about the infinite. Sadly that opinion hasn't changed.

I have expressed myself here I think cogently and clearly. It is not an 'irrational position' it is just that it [seems to] operate from different predicates. Still I would SO MUCH like to have you tell me about this Absolute and the 'use of the absolute'. Perhaps you can help me... ;-)

You are determined - I will give you that. If years of people telling you about "this 'Absolute'" didn't get you to understand then what chance have I got?

[Talking Ass]

Ah, you're fooling yourself Jupi. If you really had a core, and if there were really something in that core of value and also communicable, you would do it. You would be compelled to do it and it would flow out of you with little effort. And even more: it would convince and influence. But when one worships abstractions and something that begins resemble hollowness or failure, is it possible that one's best choice, as yours seems to be, is to go silent? In relation to this, the position I articulate, and which is almost universally received with contempt, always points back to the tangible. High-mindedness is a very good goal. But abstractions that one can't even speak about, where's that at?

[Kunga]

Silence, would be the best answer in describing the indescribable [Absolute]. The more you try to grasp it, the less you comprehend.
Because it is incomprehensable. After I try to comprehend it [especially babbling my opinions here], I feel like an idiot.

[jupiviv]

@Alex, a while ago you posed that exact question(what we mean by the infinite), and we had a similar discussion about it. Apparently you have forgotten everything I and others told you about "this Absolute" in that discussion. As I've said before, nobody can force(convince and influence as you say) anyone to truly understand something - at best they can point in the direction of that understanding.

[Talking Ass]

Yes, I'm sure it went in one ear...and out the other!

Even silence is not really 'silence' if it is knowing silence. True, Jupi can't sit there, dramatically abstracted, then look over at me as if he meant to say something, and then stop, and check himself, then look over at me again laughingly, ironically, and just shrug his shoulders...

But I CAN speak about what I value, about what is tangible and real, and I can do this through all sorts of means, all sorts of use of language and many other things. I guess I have the advantage! The Advantage of the Tangible!

[Diebert van Rhijn]

It might help you to understand that my role is as a sort of symbiote. I see and hear things (those facts and assembled facts that are our thinking) and let them act on me and in me. It seems that the main difference is that I have a BODY and I live in a physical world.

You mean like this?

No, because that is a parasite, or looks like one in any case.

It's a tick! Certainly with a BODY extending into a world you have to admit. Not that you care much for details but a tick, like any parasite is considered a type of symbiote "in the field". And from your description on how you are taking things in & let them act on "you" it doesn't sound there's much mutualism involved anyway.

[Kunga]

tangible and real,

Ok, but can you deconstruct that which you percieve as tangible and real ?
Yes, you can.
That wooden door, how did it get to be a door ?

Long ago a seed entered the ground, it needed water , air and light to grow.
Then eventually someone cut the tree down, and through a long process, it finally became a door.
So the reality of the door began from where ?
Where did the seed come from that grew the tree ?
You can trace the doors' reality back into infinity......
Yeah, you see the tangibleness/realityness of that door...but it is dependant on many causes and conditions before
it finally became that door....
In a million years[or a thousand], where will that tangible real door be ?
Back where it started ?

What we "see" as tangible and real is temporary and impermanent.
How "real" is that ?

Something that is really real is not tangible.
But yet here we are in this tangible material world we call reality.
When in reality everything is dependant on something else for it's existence.
Nothing just POPPED magically into existence....like that door....

[Talking Ass]

Kunga wrote: "You can trace the doors' reality back into infinity..."

You too, Kunga, are mystified. Anyone can understand the concept or the fact of infinity (in lower case), though 'absolute' has never made much sense to me. You can recite all these things and you can do it in Dennisese 'poetry' (though I liked what you wrote), but the real and tangible concern is how you live and what you do with your ideas. That is what I call 'tangible' reality. The main problem as I see it with these pseudo-Buddhist contructs is that they are used in a 'game' of undermining one's relationship to one's very self, and to one's life however impermanent.

Diebert wrote: And from your description on how you are taking things in & let them act on "you" it doesn't sound there's much mutualism involved anyway.

Yes, I guess you're right. It is all self-sacrifice on my part. Such is the fate of the Bodhisattva!

Countless sentient beings, I vow to help to cross the ocean of existence.
Eternal Sufferings, I vow to end.
Innumerable spiritual methods, I vow to study and comprehend.
The buddha's unsurpassable supreme dharma, I vow to realize.

On a more serious note I have said that I sometimes feel I am the one who will gain the 'ultimate' advantage. In the 5 years or so that I have been associated with this forum I have simultaneously made an effort to do lots and lots of side-reading. The way I figure it, even if it isn't true, anyone else and everyone else can or could do the same thing. I guess it depends on how seriously one takes it.

And you, Diebert? How seriously do you take it? (I think you'd have to admit: not very)(I am preparing myself for one of those Diebertesque elliptical answers...with a barb...)

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Yes, I guess you're right. It is all self-sacrifice on my part. Such is the fate of the Bodhisattva!

If understanding more of human affairs is ones goal, the sacrificial as fundament has to be understood at some point. As above so below.

And you, Diebert? How seriously do you take it? (I think you'd have to admit: not very)(I am preparing myself for one of those Diebertesque elliptical answers...with a barb...)

I have no idea! But then again, you're asking someone who forgot many years ago how to answer simple questions like "how are you?". Any reply doesn't really begin to answer....↿

[Talking Ass]

Diebert wrote: "If understanding more of human affairs is ones goal, the sacrificial as fundament has to be understood at some point. As above so below.

Reminds me of a segment of the Wilhelm/Baynes I-Ching:

"A sacrifice of the higher element that produces an increase of the lower is called an out-an-out increase: it indicates the spirit that alone has power to help the world." [Hexagram 42 'Increase'].

True, Wilhelm was a Christian steeped in Chinese lore and so the expression here included mirrors almost exactly the idea behind the Christian sacrifice ("God's sacrifice of Jesus"), but at least with a 'traditionally conceived Buddhism' (as distinct fom the 'special Buddhism' for very special and gifted Genius Buddhists) one is obligated to distribute downward. And if someone had not 'distributed downward' for us, where would we then be? I shall answer: I would not be an Ass Who Talks...and you would not be So Very Many Light Years Ahead!

[David Quinn]

If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.

-

[Talking Ass]

That is rather pessimistic. SOME of what I say MUST get through. Even if no one lets on. I even think you are beginning to learn a little.

[cousinbasil]

If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup.
-

That is rather pessimistic. SOME of what I say MUST get through. Even if no one lets on. I even think you are beginning to learn a little.

The schlemiel spills the soup on the schlemazel

[Talking Ass]

Then, they both turn on the putz...

[Dan Rowden]

That is rather pessimistic. SOME of what I say MUST get through.

Well, of course some of it gets through. It's how I was able to stop taking Senokot.