Here's the Horse

 

Republic of China (1912–1949) / Lin Fengmian/ Maple Wood

Since I published my take on this last Friday, here is Michael’s piece on our discussions about our individual efforts to figure out just what is going on inside of our respective heads.  

Michaels Work:

It is difficult to fully disagree with something without sounding mad or argumentative when explaining why. This is why I like philosophy with the limitation that the only purpose is to clarify thought. With regard to Plato, it is fair to say that Platonism is incompatible with my philosophy and I try to explain why.

  

ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY:

My problem with Platonism is that to accept the presupposition that supports Platonism one must leave the realm of a logical philosophy and enter the realm of pure religion.

 

I explain my view in the attached essay that covers another step on the way to explaining the solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. There is no “perfect” or “true” object; there is physical reality and everything that people see, hear and feel is a perfectly accurate version/experience of reality, where accurate means that all of reality communicates itself to a human in accordance with the laws of physics. Plato taught men how to overthink and negate their natural human intelligence, and he did a good job at that destructive task.

 

I see no way to argue that the presupposition to Platonism could be acceptable to a logical philosophy.

 

I can agree that some ancient philosophers said rational, clever, and relevant things about people living in a culture where everybody presupposes basically the same things about the essence of human existence on Earth. Plato’s explanation of human existence still makes sense to probably most people in the modern west because most people believe in one God or another, and nearly everybody still accepts the presupposition to Platonism. But I do not. For a logical philosophy, Platonism meets all the requirements for being 100% wrong, not just a little off.

 

I agree with Ludwig Wittgenstein that philosophy should limit itself to the clarification of thought and stay out of matters that belong to science and religion.

 

I classify Plato as either a) the rational but provably wrong basis for religion, or b) something that is not up to the level of clear thinking with regard to clarifying logical thought expressed in language – it being the exact opposite.

On the other hand, I would expect Plato to be very clever about issues that I consider to be outside the bounds of philosophy – issues that that are relevant to religious beliefs inside a culture where everybody presupposes what Plato did about human existence, which is for the most part our culture in the US. I have no interest in that subject, even if it helps explain how people think today, because I consider it to be an epic philosophical mistake, and life is short.

 

The philosophical mistake that pointed humans 180 degrees off from the correct path to understanding “consciousness” of physical existence on Earth, is failing to recognize the futility of using language in words to discuss reality. This does not mean that reality, i.e., Nature, cannot be discussed; it means what Whitehead, Wittgenstein and others have said - that a philosopher discussing existence must be very careful about their use of language, which Plato certainly was not. If it ever dawned on Plato that he was confusing anthropomorphic explanations for reality with reality itself, then he never let on.

 

EXISTENTIALISM: I think that the article you shared on Existentialism is fine, and I like the idea of people being hopeful about the possibility that existential philosophy might help mankind in the future; but with my view of existence, I am 100% behind the critique of Existentialism (up to now) that I put in my book Nature Before Words as the last essay titled “Being”.

 

The essay is 27 pages in the book, but to put it in a nutshell, I see that Existentialism in my lifetime has had two primary aspects to it that go together as a set: 1) the glorification of the human self and species as something above/separate from the remainder of Nature, and 2) advanced whining.

 

An example of (1) might be taken from the premise of the article itself, which is that after the senseless violence of WWI, followed by the Nazis and WWII, people thought that existentialism could be a means to preventing history from repeating itself. I believe that Existentialism properly conducted would do the opposite and explain why history will repeat itself. I see no good reason to expect anything from Philosophy beyond the clarification of thought. The problem is that almost nobody is interested in clarifying thought (philosophy) because everybody is content believing what they believe, and most have invested too much effort in justifying it to themselves. That is a subject for psychology, which philosophy should have no part of as far as I am concerned.

 

An example of (2), whining, is the idea that humans have it rough existing on planet Earth because, as the existential phrase goes, a human is just “thrown into the world”. Considering that Homo sapiens sits in a class of its own at the top of Nature’s food chain, and babies that become philosophers are born in a hospital, I propose that this well-known existential phrase qualifies as whining, considering what all the other forms of life on Earth are faced with. The argument in support of philosophic whining is that humans can think about matters that other less intelligent species cannot, so it is harder for a human to exist without anxiety than it is for an animal or plant. Thus, the argument in support of existential whining is more whining.