SHORT PHILOSOPHICAL REPLY TO A CRITIC - Jersey Flight

"Mr. Flight, I find your posts to be a hash of noise. Your posts are getting worse and worse."

I am all for criticism, I even demand it! There is no better way to progress, but your criticism is just an empty assertion without any content of value. I can only wonder, are you talking about my thought or my style?

I do have a particular style, which is derived from much of the classic philosophy I have read. I do not repent of it. I can indeed respect and understand that it's not to everyone's taste. At the end of the day the only thing that matters is whether we are saying anything of value, whether our knowledge provides explanatory power.

Another interesting point worth mentioning, is the power our thought has when it comes to penetrating concepts and images. Many writers are good at citing material, but the actual content of their thought is woefully lacking. They cannot follow the specifics of thought. Consider, for example, the content of Hegel:

"...From the concrete itself or its synthetic proposition, abstraction could indeed extract by analysis the proposition of identity; but then, in fact, it would not have left experience as it is, but altered it; for the fact is that experience contains identity in unity with difference and is the immediate refutation of the assertion that abstract identity as such is something true, for the exact opposite, namely, identity only in union with difference, occurs in every experience." Hegel’s Science of Logic”, translated by A. V. Miller, George Allen & Unwin,1969pg.415 (Analytical Table of Contents Paragraph 878)

Here Hegel is simply referring to the fact that we can make an empirical investigation of the concept of identity, but as he says, this approach would not leave experience, but alter it, which is to say, it would stand above it, not as reality, but as a false abstraction. In other words, experience, in this case, would deceive existence. "For the fact is," says Hegel, experience is not as it appears (experience is not a singularity) but contains a plurality of phenomena which make up its being [identity, unity, difference]. Hegel says, this existing fact stands as an immediate refutation of singular identity (Absolute Identity), which is nothing more than a form of abstract idealism without concrete existence in reality. And the reason this stands as an immediate refutation is precisely because experience is not a singularity, hence this simple impression is obliterated by the concrete plurality of being.   

One must know how to read philosophers. My writing is no different:

'Being is the only reality of the Absolute -- Being is itself the Absolute! That this classification belongs to Concepts or God is a fiction. Only the most abstract, idealistic skeptic, would dare to deny it. Existence is the one premise that is not controversial.' Ibid. The Great Philosophical Anger

All philosophers long to get at the Absolute, but nearly every philosopher distorts the Absolute's essence, attributing it to a Concept or a notion of God. This was Hegel's mistake. The truth of the Absolute is horribly plain and simple, it is nothing more or less than material being. It's astounding, wherever we look as thinkers, there we always find the same premise: that of the authority of existence. No theist denies the existence of the universe, they simply try to add to it or subtract from it. Any thinker that desires to think powerfully must begin with the premise of the authority of being. The problem is that we are easily lured away from this premise. It takes a powerful thinker to remain consistent to this premise as they pass through the cultural layers of thought.

What I have stated, in the above paragraph, is the foundation of all thinking. Our logic must begin with the reality of Being, no matter how much it seems to contradict our notions of logic. This seems simple enough, and we all give lip service to it, but in reality it has brutal psychological ramifications. Hence, we struggle to remain consistent with it, we struggle, not merely to embrace it, but to think about existence from this vantage. Man hates it; raw being terrifies us because we are fragile and this universe is hostile to our fragility.

-
-
-