Re: Why has man been described as the scum of the universe?
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Re: Why has man been described as the scum of the universe?
But the discipline is a lie insofar as the change intrinsic to it is the competent application of unyielding conviction, even if that conviction is reduced to the most abstract terms and standards such as the axioms of math geometry and logic. Today we have forgotten how to ask about these, like the excluded middle, the concept of number, or the certitude of geometric relations. And if these axioms may seem the most rigorous and reliable of truths, that only the most skilled technicians can master, cleansing their thoughts of more human rational functions, the rest of us are stuck with the rather clumsier abundance of differing insights that can only support the conviction of unchanging truth through the invention of an abstract tertium-quid. An idealized support, not to our particular and personal convictions but to the conviction that the changing qualities of mind represent idiosyncrasies, to be corrected by that abstracted support that conviction be ultimately fixed. And if religion is just epiphenomenal to that conviction, science is, if anything, an even more entrenched version of it. Do we even know what “1” is? Or are we too busy enjoying the benefits to our convictions of taking it as axiomatic? If there are no sustainable convictions, if the very discipline of trying to sustain them proves this, then the dynamic to our convictions is the most telling tale of all. But convictions always tend to suppress what we learn from this. In philosophy there are no axioms. Everything is in doubt. But no one can endure that doubt. And so we limit ideas to questions that bracket-in permissible doubt in the context of undoubted axiom and terms. Sometimes, mostly, we call it god. More rarely, but perhaps with greater conviction, we call it science. And either way fight like rabid dogs over the differences. Unless, of course, we recognize the qualifier those differences are to received terms and what comes of those terms through our differences.
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023