A republic ruled by an oligarchy of philosopher kings hasn’t been shown not to work. Probably work better than the last 8 years of America, anyway. But that, the geo-centric thing, the astronomy, and the elements thing can be explained away by the dating of them. I don’t know that people talk about those last three things anyway.
But what’s wrong with the allegory of the cave (the shadow world)? Are you also discounting Descartes? Have you proven that we’re not in the Matrix? I mean, there’s Occham’s razor and all, but what’s wrong with it as philosophy?
When I was a freshman, just a couple of years after Plato retired, I took a course on the history of utopias. At the end, the professor asked which utopia we had liked the best and which the least. Almost universally - and this was a large class - we voted Plato’s Republic to be the worst. The professor, who considered it the best, was not happy. I think he left soon after to find a more congenial university.
(Walden Two was voted best, mostly by default, since we thought all the visions of utopia were awful. Since this was the 1960s, the last period when people actually took utopias seriously, we were ahead of our time.)
Plato was basically a poophead. Take the shadows of the cave and shove them. They’re meaningful only if you accept the rest of his philosophy and sophistry otherwise.
I remember asking my teacher how we can blame people for their mistakes, that’s not to say I didn’t beleive in punishment, (touch a hot stove…). She said because people have a choice. I said they had a choice in some way, in that they, (perhaps), contomplated doing something “wrong” and still did it.
I tried to get into this whole thing about how everything effects us. Our biochemistry, upbringing, growth, environment… then I shut up and said.
It’s human to be mad, and bitter but…
If you rewound life as if it were a VHS tape, and paused right before Timothy Mcveigh made the decision to do what he did, knowing full well he was born the same way, made the same way, even the little microscopic things inside his body and out were all the same, how could he have a choice to not go through with it.
I wondered why I wasn’t popular in school…
Now I feel the need to clarify… I don’t know this 100% true. All I have to go on is what I know now. Back then I believed in the death penalty, not for punishment, but rather means to eliminate someone who’s unable to adapt and is dangerous. I have since reconsidered the death penalty, because of mentally impaired and innocent people dying.
I don’t know if it has to do with existentialism. But many would consider it a bleak out-look on life. Especially as a kid. I don’t know if it has to do with existentialism. But many would consider it a bleak out-look on life. Especially as a kid. (The thread HAS derailed a bit anyway’s.)
I agree with your description of Platonism, but your description of Existentialism comes a little too close too positivism.
Existentialism doesn’t entirely do away with questions of metaphysics, but, in the tradition of Kant, turns our attention more to how we as subjects perceive the world. While the Platonist would say the object you see in the world is just, as you say, an “imperfect representation” of an ideal essence, the positivist would say the object is just what it is. The existentialist, on the other hand, would reframe the question in terms of how do we, as knowing subjects, exist in relationship to that object.
Since we can never get outside of our own subjectivity, we’re left with the puzzle about how do we even create meaning in the first place. While the object we see in the world may appear to be fixed in its meaning (we can understand its properties in a scientific, positivist way), how we interpret that meaning is based on the shifting sands of human consciousness.
If we adopt a Sartrean point of view (and I must admit, most of my familiarity with existentialism comes through Sartre’s writings), the object in the world is a “being-in-itself.” The human subject, however, doesn’t perceive itself to be as fixed and stable in meaning as the exterior object that it’s looking at. The human subject is what Sartre calls the “being-for-itself.” The more you examine the structures of the being-for-itself, the less stable one’s platform becomes–indeed, you end up confronted with a void of meaning at the very core of one’s being. There is no way to justify why you exist, and yet you are present in this world, surrounded by these other objects that seem to be justified essences. E.g., the keyboard on which I’m typing this message was made to perform a particular function. I, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of pointing to any particular function as the reason for my existence.
So, I–and you*–are left with this disparity between the seemingly fixed reality of the physical world, and our own subjective experience, which is always in flux. Ultimately, the decision to create meaning in one’s own life and experience is up to the individual subject. However, this responsibility is so great that it’s easier to retreat into pre-packaged identities (which is what Sartre would call “bad faith”–the refusal to accept responsibility for one’s own existence, and instead to pretend that one’s identity is exactly identical with the roles that one plays in life–as an employee, as a family member, as a friend, etc.).
The alternative is to acknowledge the absurdity of the human condition–that there IS no meaning exterior to our lives, and that each of us is entirely responsible for who we are–and the outcome of this realization is complete and utter freedom.
[N.B. I should stress again that much of the above is my somewhat limited understanding of Sartrean existentialism, which may not necessarily represent all existentialist viewpoints].
*the question of solipsism is one that Sartre, at least, never completely resolves.
I guess I don’t have much use for philosophy in general. In the specific case of the cave allegory I just don’t see how it helps in any way to explain the world or to help one make decisions.
Have I proven we’re not in The Matrix? No, but I think the burden of proof is on you and Keanu for that one.
Well, take the concept of infinity. It is a philosophical concept. Infinity exists only in concept. However, you can’t do calculus without it. The world as we know it is built on these concepts by the people who do that sort of thing, and most of them are paradoxical.
Take the Heisenberg principle: you can’t know both the position and velocity of a particle without measuring it, and measuring it changes the position and velocity. You can make big bombs go boom with this idea, a purely philosophical idea. It lead Schrodinger to invent the cat that is both alive and dead at the same time as a metaphor (I hope) to explain it. Much of the world is easier to understand if you can accept illogical opposites exisiting simultaneously. Ever loved someone and hated them at the same time?
The thing that is difficult about philosophy is that it is a different way about thinking about things we are very set in our ways about thinking. It’s why a college sophomore with a new philosophy is so irritating, he/she makes no sense about perfectly sensible subjects.
Well sure, but perhaps DanBlather’s complaint can be sharpened:
Both of your examples are a) analytic b) from the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science respectively and c) decidedly not existentialism. There’s plenty of examples of analytic philosophy informing the natural sciences and mathematics, and the converse holds true (Wittgenstein’s concept of number as an exponent is embodied in the lambda calculus by Church numerals, and the lambda calculus gave the concept of uncomputable problems back to philosophers to chew on; constructivism, a philosophical tradition, splits those who favour classicism over intuitionistism in mathematics, and mathematicians used the concept of computability to further refine the notion of constructivism, etc.). Both these examples give us tangible benefits in the real world.
In this sense, certain branches of philosophy, mathematics and science are closely allied. It’s when other branches, (largely) in the “continental” tradition, start denying things like objective realities, that people start accusing philosophy as being facile, sophistry or omphaloskepticism.
So, perhaps DanBlather’s complaint should really be about non-analytic philosophy.
(Also, there’s nothing illogical, per se, about true contradictions—dialetheia—in fact, some would argue that accepting dialetheia and favouring paraconsistent logics over classical logic should be how we reason about the world. See Graham Priest, for example, whose book has been on my “to read” list for ages :mad:!)
I always imagine Sisyphus happy not because he’s struggling against authority, but because he has an indelible purpose. Sartre felt that man built walls around his perceptions to hide from his horrible freedom. Sisyphus doesn’t need to do that because unlike the rest of us, he isn’t free – so he doesn’t need to pretend that he isn’t.
That’s a good interpretation as well. But I think part of the happiness is contained in the struggle, but note that it’s not struggle against authority, but struggle against (and acceptance of) absurdity.
As I mentioned above, virtually none of the existentialists called themselves existentialists. And they had differing opinions on what should be included under the existential definition. I must admit I don’t remember much about Kierkegaard. We only read a short section of his where he discussed Matthew 4 (the devil’s temptations of Jesus in the desert).
According to who? And by what definition of “concept”? You can believe that infinity is only a concept, but reality indicates that infinity is, well, real. There are an infinite number of numbers, for example. Uh oh, now you’re probably going to go down that old road about numbers and math being just a concept, too. I’ll just say one thing: since it’s the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus that determines what element it is, and the differences between the elements are about as real as anything could ever be, you can go ahead and believe what you want about numbers, but reality will still be what it is.
Are there any physics equations that use infinity as an answer to describe “reality?” I understand that some equations use as intermediate calculation steps but not as a final answer that corresponds to the real world.
Or will the discussion of “infinity” always deteriorate to disagreement because nobody will be able to agree on the meaning of the words “concept” and “reality?”
I said the examples were of philosophy. I did not say the were existentialism. Mr. Blather dissed philosophy in general, and I wanted to show direct usefulness of philosophy. Thank you for pointing out that the examples were not of existentialism.
What we perceive with our senses isn’t reality, it’s our brain’s interpretation of reality. Think of the experiment where volunteers are asked to count the number of times a basketball is passed between players, and at the end 50% don’t notice the performer in a gorilla suit, much less that she moonwalked halfway across the screen at one point.
How many times have you heard of crimes with dozens of witnesses who all disagree about what the victim looked like, what the culprit looked like, or even that anything criminal happened at all?
Imagine that you’re in front of a swingset, the seat moving back and forth. Right as the seat reaches its apex, you reach out and touch it. You feel your hands touch it. You see your hand touch it.
But you don’t. Not really.
It takes 0.2 seconds for your visual cortex to translate the signals initially fired off from the neurons on your retina into an intelligible representation of the objects that you’re viewing. If your brain merely let you see images as fast as it could decode them, when you reached your hand out for the seat, it have been 0.2 seconds too late – the seat would be falling away by then.
Instead, your brain presented to you images of what it expected that the scene would appear at a given point in time. Then, 0.2 seconds later, it goes into your sensory memories and merges the decoded scene into what it initially presented as its best guess. Your memories then trick you into believing that what you recall seeing at the time is the same as what you actually perceived.
I’m not sure what the decoding times for auditory or haptic signals, but I’m sure your brain has to do something similar with those, and then synchronize everything to boot. It’s amazing there’s enough brainpower left over to do anything as simple as discussing philosophy.
How is it meaningless? Unless you contend that we know all of reality, thought experiments are never meaningless. Scientific paradigm shifts occur because of thought experiments. People thought everything was made of four elements. We thought that Newton’s physics explained everything until Einstein came around.
I’m not saying there’s a 1-to-1 correlation between believing in the matrix and the theory of relativity. But to assert that we should discount as meaningless all that can’t be sensed with our senses or with current scientific experimentation is pretty close-minded.
But none of that is related to what Plato was thinking. He thought there were “ideal forms” that existed and what we saw were imperfect forms. I doubt that knowledge in any of the areas you mentioned were helped by Plato’s cave analogy.