What is Philosophy?

[max_freakout]

what is the meaning of life?

 

[Dillinger4]

You are comedy gold.

 

[Santino]

It's like firky found a copy of Sophie's World.

 

[revol68]

It's like firky found a copy of Sophie's World.

I was thinking more cheesypoof but your's works too.

 

[revol68]

what is the meaning of life?

what a silly question.

 

[bluestreak]

what is the meaning of life?

have at least two nice cups of tea a day with your feet up.

------------

Why are we here? what's life all about?
Is god really real, or is there some doubt?
Well, tonight, we're going to sort it all out
For, tonight, it's 'the meaning of life'

What's the point of all this hoax?
Is it the chicken and the egg time? are we just yolks?
Or, perhaps, we're just one of god's little jokes
Well, ça c'est 'the meaning of life'

Is life just a game where we make up the rules
While we're searching for something to say
Or are we just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating dn-- nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay

What is life? what is our fate?
Is there a heaven and hell? do we reincarnate?
Is mankind evolving, or is it too late?
Well, tonight, here's 'the meaning of life'

For millions, this 'life' is a sad vale of tears
Sitting 'round with really nothing to say
While the scientists say we're just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating dn-- nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay

So, just why-- why are we here
And just what-- what-- what-- what do we fear?
Well, ce soir, for a change, it will all be made clear
For this is 'the meaning of life'. c'est le sens de la vie
This is 'the meaning of life'

 

[Jonti]

It's Ok, apparantly he doesn't really exist, so neither do his opinions on this thread.

There is even a handy board feature to make it so!

 

[max_freakout]

what a silly question.

it is largely the motivation behind philosophy

 

[gorski]

Anyone read Ernst Bloch, guys?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Bloch

There was a book published in ex-YU, in which they put together all the greats at the time on the question from the Top Post, so:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/iyr0j5

Cemu jos filozofija? (Why/what's the point to Philosophy?)
Theodor W. Adorno - Cemu još filozofija
Ernst Bloch - O sadašnjem stanju filozofije
Jurgen Habermas - Cemu još filozofija?
Henri Lefebvre - Metamorfoza filozofije
Louis Althusser - Je li jednostavno biti marksist u filozofiji?
Paul Ricoeur - Buducnost filozofije i pitanje o subjektu
Martin Heidegger - Kraj filozofije i zadaca mišljenja
Hans Georg Gadamer - Hermeneutika kao prakticna filozofija
Karl Jaspers - Filozofija u buducnosti
Bertrand Russell - Vrijednost filozofije
Max Bense - Pojam filozofije

contributed...

Bloch: where I'd search for some pointers:

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/hope/h2/romagnoli paper.pdf

http://www.bloch.de/content/view/46/114/

http://www.philo.de/Philosophie-Seiten/personen/bloch.shtml

 

[Melia]

philosophy....questioning the things that people are too scared to question

 

[max_freakout]

philosophy....questioning the things that people are too scared to question

why does it scare people to ask these questions?

 

[Meltingpot]

Philosophy is just a historically useful label for a number of different pursuits. In its broadest sense it means the attempt to understand what the world* without recourse to mythology or religion, i.e. figuring shit out for ourselves based on reason and evidence.

In the West this has traditionally been broken down into two slightly less broad categories of a) what is the world like? and b) how should we live?


*'World' meaning universe or multiverse or whatever it is that we decide is the place where we all are.

That's what I'd say as well. Christopher Ross once said that philosophy was about "zooming in and out" of life, to examine it on a scale different from the one we normally live it at, both micro and macro. Just as the Earth can bee seen on an atomic or subatomic level on the one hand, and on a cosmic or supergalactic level on the other (both different from our normal experience of it), so philosophy aims to do the same to life - roughly, the Aristotelian and Platonist approaches to philosophy (endless detail and nitpicking vs. soaring generalities).

.

 

[gorski]

why does it scare people to ask these questions?

'Cause they're spiritually lazy sissies afraid of what they'd have to do if they found out they are somehow incompetent, intellectually or morally...

Living a lie is far easier. Unfortunately Humans are, by and large, conformists, through and through...

Wanting truth over lie is a demanding business! And that's a pre-requisite for it all.

 

[bluestreak]

I'm not sure if people are scared of the questions philosophy looks at, IME it's more that they aren't interested.

 

[gorski]

Philosophical questions are everybody's Q's!!! We are all interested in those!

The hard work, however, is not done by all. Sadly.

What is even more sad is that the great majority of those are not exactly prepared, by and large, to give credit to those who do/have done/continue doing exactly that...

May I warmly recommend Hegel's jolly little text, written to amuse a very jolly company [Fichte, Shelling and so on]: "Who thinks abstractly?"

That is quite a way to set the Q properly and answer in principle.

Philosophers do the hard work and do not substitute particularities for generalities but preserve those, while raising to the level of the universal [the level of Notion].

Uneducated have a difficulty in doing that and so philosophers thinks concretly, while non-philosophers think abstractly, while subsumin a whole for a particular [element or a few of those at most].

http://hegel.marxists.org/

Who Thinks Abstractly? [It's under "Think Abstractly?"]

That everybody present should know what thinking is and what is abstract is presupposed in good society, and we certainly are in good society. The question is merely who thinks abstractly. The intent, as already mentioned, is not to reconcile society with these things, to expect it to deal with something difficult, to appeal to its conscience not frivolously to neglect such a matter that befits the rank and status of beings gifted with reason. Rather it is my intent to reconcile the beautiful world with itself, although it does not seem to have a bad conscience about this neglect; still, at least deep down, it has a certain respect for abstract thinking as something exalted, and it looks the other way not because it seems too lowly but because it appears too exalted, not because it seems too mean but rather too noble, or conversely because it seems an Espèce, something special; it seems something that does not lend one distinction in general society, like new clothes, but rather something that — like wretched clothes, or rich ones if they are decorated with precious stones in ancient mounts or embroidery that, be it ever so rich, has long become quasi-Chinese — excludes one from society or makes one ridiculous in it.

Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from an empty affectation of nobility that would place itself above that of which it is not capable, but on account of the inward inferiority of the matter.

The prejudice and respect for abstract thinking are so great that sensitive nostrils will begin to smell some satire or irony at this point; but since they read the morning paper they know that there is a prize to be had for satires and that I should therefore sooner earn it by competing for it than give up here without further ado.

I have only to adduce examples for my proposition: everybody will grant that they confirm it. A murderer is led to the place of execution. For the common populace he is nothing but a murderer. Ladies perhaps remark that he is a strong, handsome, interesting man. The populace finds this remark terrible: What? A murderer handsome? How can one think so wickedly and call a murderer handsome; no doubt, you yourselves are something not much better! This is the corruption of morals that is prevalent in the upper classes, a priest may add, knowing the bottom of things and human hearts.

One who knows men traces the development of the criminal's mind: he finds in his history, in his education, a bad family relationship between his father and mother, some tremendous harshness after this human being had done some minor wrong, so he became embittered against the social order — a first reaction to this that in effect expelled him and henceforth did not make it possible for him to preserve himself except through crime. — There may be people who will say when they hear such things: he wants to excuse this murderer! After all I remember how in my youth I heard a mayor lament that writers of books were going too far and sought to extirpate Christianity and righteousness altogether; somebody had written a defense of suicide; terrible, really too terrible! — Further questions revealed that The Sufferings of Werther [by Goethe, 1774] were meant.

This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.

 

[Melia]

maybe people being afraid of the answers would be why they are scared to ask the questions....it is what i have found in doing my philosophy studies anyways

 

[butchersapron]

Or maybe it's a load of self-reinforcing wank by people scared that their specialist role as 'philosophers' will be blown away. They're scared. No they're not. They bored. By either a) psychedlic casualties or b) academic casaulties.

Use you brain. Simple.

 

[Dillinger4]

Or maybe it's a load of self-reinforcing wank by people scared that their specialist role as 'philosophers' will be blown away. They're scared. No they're not. They bored. By either a) psychedlic casualties or b) academic casaulties.

Use you brain. Simple.

This ^^

 

[gorski]

Butcher indeed. And a sissy. Like all bullies.

 

[Dillinger4]

I liked Sartre's use of the word 'sissy'.

 

[butchersapron]

Butcher indeed. And a sissy. Like all bullies.

What exactly is a sissy gorksi?

 

[Jonti]

Sartre ... says that 'to be a “sissy” ‘is not a factual given’ and ‘is only a name given to the way in which I suffer my fatigue.’ And how does Sartre define the way in which he suffers his fatigue? – by a contrast with the way in which his non-sissy companions suffer theirs:

If I question one of my companions, he will explain to me that he is fatigued, of course, but that he loves his fatigue; he gives himself up to it as to a bath; it appears to him in some way as the privileged instrument for discovering the world which surrounds him, for adapting himself to the rocky roughness of the paths, for discovering the “mountainous” quality of the slopes. In the same way it is this slight sunburn on the back of his neck and this slight ringing in his ears which will enable him to realize a direct contact with the sun. Finally the feeling of effort is for him that of fatigue overcome. But as his fatigue is nothing but the passion which he endures so that the dust of the highways, the burning of the sun, the roughness of the roads may exist to the fullest, his effort (i.e. this sweet familiarity with a fatigue which he loves, to which he abandons himself and which nevertheless he himself directs) is given as a way of appropriating the mountain, of suffering it to the end and being victor over it.

He concludes:

Thus my companion’s fatigue is lived in a vaster project of a trusting abandon to nature, or a passion consented to in order that it may exist at full strength, and at the same time a project of sweet mastery and appropriation. It is only through this project that the fatigue will be able to be understood and that it will have meaning for him.

These are rather long quotations from Sartre – but I hope they make their point. The central point is (I take it) that mental attitudes are intentional, that is to say, boredom, curiosity, depression, lassitude, perhaps even tiredness (which is part of what Sartre is talking about) imply an orientation or project towards the world as the field for our actions, as inviting us to action. And even our sense of our own bodies may be mediated by a sense of external objects. So Sartre thinks that a sense of fatigue overcome is also a way of appropriating the mountain.

I find in that passage an excellently suggestive description of how what we might commonsensically assume are purely bodily states have a mental component – so that we cannot fully describe the bodily states without bringing in the mental component. It suggests at the same time that a mental state (boredom, perhaps) naturally goes with, and perhaps has to imply dispositions of the body.

source

 

[Dillinger4]

That consciousness is intentional is, I think, the key part in understanding Existential philosophy.

That last point you make, that

It suggests at the same time that a mental state (boredom, perhaps) naturally goes with, and perhaps has to imply dispositions of the body.

Leads onto Merleau-Ponty's argument: That we have a kind of 'bodily intentionality'.

 

[Dillinger4]

Oh and the other thing the Sartre quotes point out is that we choose our own interpretation of the world. The ability to change your mind about your initial project is the existential freedom that he wants to prove, and that in changing your project and priorities, you change your self.

 

[gorski]

That consciousness is intentional is...

Leads onto Merleau-Ponty's argument: That we have a kind of 'bodily intentionality'.

Sure: to eat, to drink, to sleep and to fuck...