blog
Should there be a subject?
Is there a difference between observing an external object and the internal one called the subject?
Is it here that Western philosophy fails?
Another person’s object can be a subject, and vice versa. By label of subject have we not created a subject-centric of the world when really there is no central view?
I can sympathise with OOO for this reason. But at the same time with sense as the only access to the world, we have no choice but to have a central view.
There is no (inside) joke.
It is not
I think therefore I am,
but rather,
I think I am, therefore I am.
The difference is one of illusion.
“God is a metaphor,” I said.
“Is that with a capital ‘G’ or a lowercase ‘g’?” my friend asked.
“You know I only throw stones at Christians (I had meant ‘to Christians’).”
(I am really just playing catchball with stones, you know. The Other(s) always think I am attacking them.)
Institution (or social institution) – a “structure” which simultaneously uses and is used by individuals and social groups. Well known and often studied institutions are culture, society, religion, science, philosophy, art, literature, music, language, politics and government, economy and business, family and the individual.
God is a metaphor.
I have been trying to get into Speculative Realism lately. Not an easy philosophy but then again philosophy is dealing with anything but easy subjects. Nothing less then the what exists and how we know.
During this little adventure I came across a term – object-oriented ontology – that, at first, seemed illogical but made sense after careful inspection. Here is an excellent jargon-free definition of it by Ian Bogost:
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.
Essentially, it is a kind of trying to be objective about something by stepping into every objects’s shoes. The language is nuanced to be human center-free.
It feels like something David Suzuki would agree to (this would make sense since he is a geneticist-turned-activist). In sustainability, it seems to have something in common with the animal rights movement opting to be less anthropocentric.
(Monologue: There seems to be a move away from human-centred views and looking at the world from what I call The Other. But whether we can learn to avoid projection of The Self in performing this act. Perhaps I can call this project Willful Philosophical Out-Of-Body Re-embodiment.)
The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.
From Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
I agree with Rationalists that concepts and knowledge can be gained independently of sense experience, insofar as there is nothing outside of space-object-time. Some kind of knowledge must exist first of space-object-time before other kinds of concepts and knowledge can come into being independently.
Empiricist are therefore right to claim also that sense experience is the source of all our concepts and knowledge, insofar as rational concepts and knowledge depends on the first source of sense experience.
There are therefore two sources of knowledge – sense experience and reasoning. Rationality must come from the first instance of sense experience, be it a lifetime of one second or one hundred years. Without that “spark” there are no rational concepts and knowledge.
I have come to the conclusion that nothing exists except for the physical world. The mind is a product of an object, namely an body. A personality is a product of the mind. This evidentially converges with the Buddhist concept of non-self (anatta). To me, what is called the ‘self’ is not what it seems. It may be considered a kind of illusion.
If there is a god and he is to be believed in by me, it should be about God and me, and nothing more. Yet when Christianity begins to tell me that it is alright to be heterosexual and have children but not homosexual and love someone of the same sex I begin to wonder what has sexuality have to do with my faith in him. The link between family values and Christianity is an uncomfortable one for me.
I have a wife and two children. I could not be a better model for Christian family virtue. Yet, that is not the point. The other constrains that Christianity places on the christian is what turns me away from Christianity. It makes me ask the hard questions about Christianity, and whether it is about The Church and the community and not about the god as such.
The Buddha, Buddhism and the Buddhist community do not place such burdens on the practitioner. It is all about my practice and my relationship to Buddhism. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not tell me not to believe in other faiths or other systems of thinking, but to ask whether these things are true in their own right. I chose to be a Buddhist, I chose Buddhism for its openness, its lack of bias to other thinking.
Homosexuality is not wrong in the Buddhist view. Sexual misconduct, be it perpetrated as heterosexual or homosexual acts, is wrong. There is no bias towards one religion like Christianity demands and discrimination against something irrelevant to faith like homosexuality. I cannot believe in a god which asks me of this. And I doubt a true god would demand such. My only conclusion then is that the values are that of the people and not of the god itself.
signature103 