Category: philosophy

I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.

The projection of history

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We are always living in some kind of “now”. Our view of the world is forever locked into a “present” or illusionary presence. And in this way we habitually prefer the “synchrony of X” over its diachrony. What can only happen in any interpretation of “the history of X” is forever a reading with now in mind when now never was there in the past. Retrospection is never free from this now, forever placing itself into the past when it was not there. That is why in retrospect everything seems obvious.

To be pure historians of Buddhism we must place ourselves in the past without the baggage called “knowledge” into that time and place. The further back in time we go the less accurate the representation becomes. For example, Chinese Buddhism of the 4th century knows nothing of its advance into Japan the next centuries. It is not, “it had not reached Japan yet”, but rather, “did it know it was going anywhere to begin with”. I doubt Buddhism in the 1st century BCE knew it was entering China either. Buddhism simply had no plans. These are projections onto history after rather than before or during the fact. The interpretation of history continually changes as a time pushes forward, added to by more and more retrospection. The more we think the more the past changes.

Id/superego/ego, Japanese culture, Schopenhauer 

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If there is one thing useful that I would have to pick that Freud gave us, it is the idea of id, superego and ego. The id is what you want to do. The superego is what society wants you to do, and the ego is what you do in light of your id and superego. Something is wrong if you let either the id or superego do all the thinking. It is best to take the balance with the ego.

Japanese culture has this built-in to their thinking with the concept of in-group/out-group. We must always think of ourselves not as just mere individuals but also in relation to society.

Or this is similar to Schopenhauer’s idea of will and representation. We are individuals in charge and control of our self (will) to be contrasted to things outside beyond our control (representation).

While abstraction is something we humans are good at it is dangerous to let it take over without a return to the real world or reality. No matter what the world is, there we exist and only exist. Any other thought is wrong.

Please … show me something that is permanent 

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It isn’t that something permanent does exist (though that is highly unlikely because if it does exist it has been hiding pretty well) but that it hasn’t shown itself whatsoever. 
Some say the proof is God but nobody has made visual identification of him. There have been no “last seen at …” but just talk. It is all talk. “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word is God,” someone named John wrote. But isn’t this just a clever (read: wilful) metaphor?
No, there will never be any way for us to prove that God doesn’t exist. But neither do they have a way to prove that he does (and a capital ‘H’ for He isn’t proof, but only again a choice on the part of the writer. 

All, concepts

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The only conclusion in life that I can draw is that all things are concepts. Real objects can only be concepts within my mind, so abstract objects can only be concepts within my mind as well. Nothing can escape this conclusion. Concepts do not “float” out there in the world independent of the mind. They must be constructs of the mind.

Before the first person came into being and after the last person passes away all concepts did not exist. The concepts of self, man and society exist as long as at least one person exists to remember them. Perhaps consciousness is like this, and nothing more. 

What does it mean to be a philosopher?

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According to one dictionary, philosophy is the study of the nature and meaning of existence, truth, good and evil etc. And a philosopher is someone who studies and develops ideas about the nature and meaning of existence, truth, good and evil etc.

Personally, I prefer to boil down this definition to just philosophy is the study of the nature of existence and truth. It follows thus a philosopher is someone who studies and develops ideas about the nature of existence and truth.

The inclusion of meaning assumes that existence has meaning to begin with. Here, I beg to differ (or perhaps go along with existentialists like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre) and point out that nowhere does it say life has implicit meaning, that only we have assumed it to have meaning, and a universal one at that. It is for this reason I believe that Western philosophy tends to think Eastern Philosophy, particularly Buddhism is nihilistic in outlook.

Thus, Western philosophy has a tendency to belittle relativism and relativistic meaning. They are happy to say things like the only constant is change and not blink an eyelid at the relativity and even the contradiction in the statement or proposition. One must also see the nature of language (move towards a philosophy of language) in order to understand the nature of knowledge (epistemology), the nature of existence (ontology) and the nature of reality (metaphysics).

And so I must therefore question the nature of religion as well. I have never known a religion to be personal, for one person and that person alone. If it were then its god must be non-universal. In short, religion is a social act. If it were a non-social act then we need not talk of church and religion in the first place. But the fact that we do have church and the concept of a religion we must assume religion to be above all else a relativistic social construct. And if so then the talk of good and evil must also be relativistic as well. Philosophy, therefore, must reject religion, or at least study religion as part of the nature of human existence, not to assume it is part of or above philosophy as such. There is what I will suggest here as not so much a philosophy of religion but a religion of philosophy, and that it has infiltrated Western philosophical tradition so thoroughly that it had almost escaped notice.

Chains and the Imagined Freedom

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Man, everywhere, is in chains (limited and transient as a condition of existence) yet he believes that he is free. 

The celebrity that is God 

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To me, God is like a celebrity – He had been perfect until His history of plastic surgery surfaced. After that I had become more interested in his history than in him.

The fact that we now have a history of Christianity and a history of God means he loses his power upon man. No longer is ‘he’ with a capital ‘H’. And no longer is God beyond quantifiability. Once quantified we can measure him, compare him.

But by insisting that he is unquantifiable we put him beyond criticism and blame. And by quantifying him we can now make him take responsibility for his role in the past, make him accountable for the present, and make him change for the better in the future.

“You are light as air & heavy as clouds”

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These lines are from my poem atheist become.

For me, a metaphor is what creates the illusion of something like God. They are concepts and nothing more. So they can be as light or as heavy as you can imagine. In the same way we can imagine that when we die we go to some place better. But do we? Is there some place to go? I ended the poem with but nothing will free you / from death and / to nowhere will you go to suggest perhaps the reason why we do imagine a heaven is precisely because the idea of nowhere to go is rather lonely. Atheists must overcome loneliness as they do not have something to comfort them as Christians do. It reminds of the line from Kafka’s novel, The Trial:

“It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.”

Damn it, Dennett! Why did you have to say it?!

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Someone had to say what had been going on in my mind. 

All along we thought robots can become humans, when in fact we, humans, are nothing but fancy biological evolutionary robots. 

The joke is on us. And the sad thing is we can think about this. 

I want to read this smart guy‘s books. 

The Necessary Angel

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Wallace Stevens has a collection of essays called The Necessary Angel. I have always liked the title. I personally do not believe in angels (I am Buddhist) but I do believe in the need for angels and such. To be human is to use the imagination. I am all for the imagination (it is only when angels interfere with the our lives of many that I see a problem).

God is a metaphor. What I mean by this is that Christians use God to present their beliefs. And as a Buddhist I use Buddha and Bodhisattvas to present mine (Buddha is a metaphor). It is not a question which is correct but that what is exactly being presented that is important. We need to put our ideas in some kind of concrete way (we have no choice) and no better is it to personify our ideas and concepts.