muso wrote on Nov 3
rd, 2008 at 4:39pm:
Soren wrote on Nov 3
rd, 2008 at 2:06pm:
If so, you should be like Cratylus - standing on street corners silently, wagging your finger at the passers-by.
Many windows are better than one. I prefer the insight of Kurosawa's Rashomon to that of Cratylus and Heroclitus.
Regardless of the absurdity of life, and as I said before, we'll get closer to the truth if we all accept that when it comes to life, we all have useful and possibly unique perspectives.
If we want to add meaning to life, we can only do it ourselves. We all do it, whether by following established religions or in many other ways, such as pursuing knowledge.
How do you get 'closer to the truth' when the very idea of formulating it is absurd, according to your reasoning:
Quote:To verbalise concepts of our purpose in the universe is immediately invoking a false premise, and as soon as we invoke a false premise, all propositions become possible. When we think that have successfully defined something in words, it has already slipped out of our reach. It has crawled away while we were defining it and it's already somewhere totally different, laughing at our efforts to define it.
The same goes for all the other stuff - 'useful and unique perspective', 'adding meaning to life' whether through religion or otherwise.
Each of your formulations, by your own reckoning, are elusive, unreliable - in short, you are NOT saying what you are saying.
You are conceptually nowehere. You have disappeared in a puff of undefinable, crawling, laughing metaphoric smoke.
You can't actually live like that. You could never cross the street, or indeed, get out of bed, if the uncertainty you formulate was a guiding conviction of your life. You are giving us, instead, a massive rhetorical overreach, hoping to demonstrate sensibility. But sensibility, like the rest, have crawled away already, laughing from a distance.
That is not pursuing knowldege or anything of the sort. Relativising everything in human affairs if impossible and therefore speaking as if it were possible is careless and thoughtless.