Philosophy takes place at the fluid boundary between what is known with certitude and what can never be known exhaustively, like standing on the earth and looking into the sky.
Anyone can see the ground on which he stands, but no one has ever seen the end of the sky. And even if we do perceive the edge of the big bang, the sky is just a symbol of Infinitude, so don't be so literal!
This line in the ampersand between earth & sky is necessarily ambiguous -- i.e., imprecise -- but nevertheless clear.
Think of a cloud, which has distinct edges from a distance but which become increasingly vague as one approaches. Doesn't mean clouds don't exist, nor that a man can't have his head in one. Don't be so literal!
It's the same with words, which is how the left creates so much mischief with them. Just because no word is exactly what it signifies, it doesn't mean words have no relationship to reality, nor that they mean whatever the left wants them to mean.
But this necessary ambiguity is like catnip to the anti-intellectual (mind-destroying) left; it is how they can define anything they want into existence, and undefine out what they don't like. As we know, abracadabra means I will create as I speak, and this is the very basis of the politico-media-academic black magic of the left.
I could get sidetracked into this two-volume biography of Hitler I'm reading, but it's rather early to invoke Godwin's Law.
Still, I've mentioned before that my time as an intern at Camarillo State Mental Hospital dealing with extreme loonies helped prepare me for dealing with everyday loonies, because in the former we see the same pathological mechanisms at work, only in a hypertrophically vivid manner -- things like projection, denial, splitting, repression, fantasy, and transference, painted over the sky with bold, primary colors.
Analogously, someone like Hitler is just an extreme version of everyday politics. Viewed through this lens, nothing he said was out of the ordinary per se, rather, just the usual lies and distortions on steroids. This is not to compare anyone to Hitler, rather, to recognize the continuity of the deep structure beneath the BS.
Thus, when Brandon points to the imaginary threat of MAGA REPUBLICANS!, it has an obvious resemblance to Nazi blather about Jews, or Slavs, or life unworthy of life. But forget about the grave danger posed by MAGA or Jew, for the underlying constant is scapegoating, which in turn is related to the omnipresence of projection, aggression, and psychic purification.
That's as far as I want to go down that Jojo rabbit hole, but the book to read is Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled. You could say that concealed within the news of the day is the scapegoat of the day: identity the scapegoat and you've seen through their primitive magic. The content always changes (kulaks, blacks, Catholics, deplorables, Tea Party, the bourgeoisie, MAGA), but the mechanism endures. https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Unveiled-Humanity-at-Crossroads/dp/0824516451/ref=sr_1_2?crid=27ALYM5IW6XNC&keywords=Gil+Bailie&qid=1662574108&s=books&sprefix=gil+bailie%2Cstripbooks%2C124&sr=1-2
About the two sides of the epistemological line in the clouds referenced above, Pieper writes that it is perfectly appropriate to pronounce on the one hand that Science has determined...
It is meaningless, on the other hand, to declare that "philosophy" has discovered or explained this or that.... No philosopher can in any way use the "results" of Plato's philosophy, except if he repeats, by and for himself, Plato's thinking.
We have aphoristic confirmation of this breaking story:
Comprehending a philosopher is being momentarily swayed by him.
Confirmation too for the ground we're standing on:
Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.
And for the abiding continuity beneath the Current Thing:
It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.
To be continued...
18 comments:
Speaking of Nazis & Bidens... and denial and word magic.
The goat of scapegoating is the goat which Jews scapegoated in the Torah. And secons is the Gentile nations the Torah and Samuel commanded them to wipe out based on lies.
Adolf?
Greenwald:
"It is astonishing to watch Dems and their allies in media corporations posture as opponents of "fascism" -- while their main goal is to unite state and corporate power to censor their critics and degrade the internet into an increasingly repressive weapon of information control."
The more things change...
Unless one's primary presupposition is In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, any of the propositions stated will only result in going down dead-end roads previously explored and discarded because they lead to nowhere.
Jojo Rabbit? I tried to watch a couple episodes of that; definitely not for me.
In reading this massive biography of Hitler, one thing that stands out is the aggressive disregard for truth, the emotional attacks on reality, and relentless lying. Gives me hope that the tyranny of wokeness won't outlast the 12 years of the Third Reich. I keep think that what can't go on won't go on, otherwise the impossible is possible, in which case the world is no longer intelligible.
It reminds me of the Taranto Principle, in that the left is so immersed in its own matrix of lies that it cannot adjust to reality and must eventually crash.
Perhaps there is some hope to be had from Chile's sound and sane rejection of the newly-proposed leftist constitution, which had a mere 388 articles (what could go wrong?). As I understand it, the usual suspects were even-handedly and persuasively promoting it in Caracas a couple of weeks ago by having a drag queen pull the Chilean flag out of his manhole while exhorting the audience to "abort Chile".
...the left is so immersed in its own matrix of lies that it cannot adjust to reality and must eventually crash.
Yes. There is a great chasm between left and right leaning individuals. The left seemingly no longer has any concept of truth, and thus they will tumble into the chasm and crash.
Interesting how just a few short years ago nobody here gave a second thought to wokeness or drag queens. It was all about tea parties and Sharia Law, and with all the same amount of anger spew. Before that it was Monicas blue dress, with Clinton even doing conservative economist bidding no less. You Christians wear your rage like some kind of fashion.
I asked credible authorities why your ultimate authority, Christ, always gets completely ignored by all this rage. The answer back was "power". A greedy people always want more greed and more power.
Kinda dulls Jesus' message, doesn't it?
Obviously, you're not a golfer.
Indeed Dude. Witness the current conservative fashion of quoting Greenwald.
Seems like yesterday that Glenn was just a gayly-married agnostic civil libertarian living in Brazil with his teenaged boyfriend who was very anti-war, a mortal enemy of the American neocon Christian. He’s never changed, calling out corporate Democrats (unlike the more socialistic AOC or Sanders) for their role in the promotion if the Iraq war. Yet here in this place, he’s suddenly become a quotable dude golfer or something.
Either somebody is in league with Satan or they're not. Hard to decide sometimes, isn't it?
One must learn to handle the weapons of the adversary, but with appropriate disgust.
You know, anon, your commentary and criticisms would be a lot more interesting and worthy of engagement if you ever actually just read the posts, took time to consider the content, and then demonstrated literally any comprehension of or engagement with what was written.
I don't think I've ever seen a comment of yours that even remotely comes close.
Ideology determines its object, rather than vice versa. Which, coincidentally, is the subject of the post I'm currently working on.
"This line in the ampersand between earth & sky is necessarily ambiguous -- i.e., imprecise -- but nevertheless clear. "
Gold.
julie, I was criticizing a comment, not the blog post. Nobody criticizes the blog posts.
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