Yes to secularism, no to racism
By John O’Mahony
Jack Straw’s article three weeks ago about the wearing of the hijab has unleashed a large and very important public discussion about the relationship of Muslims to the rest of British society.
Ministers including the Prime Minster have taken sides with — in the case of most of those who have spoken — or against, Straw’s position that Muslims are at fault in holding on to social-religious mores and practices which cut them off from others in Britain, behind self-erected and self-sustained cultural walls.
Straw in his article, and Blair in his comments, have been at pains to stress that they are not questioning the right of Muslim citizens to choose to veil themselves, but only the desirability and advisability of that choice.
Connected issues have helped focus the question raised by Straw more sharply. Should a woman who insists on keeping her face veiled be employed as classroom assistant?
Whether socialists would have chosen to start this discussion as Straw did, it is now a fact. The case for what Straw and others have done is a strong one. There is also a case against.
What Straw said, of course, was, in and of itself, reasoned and “balanced”: He added that he “defend[s] absolutely the right of any woman to wear a headscarf. As for the full veil, wearing it breaks no laws…”
His observations about the face-covering veil were, essentially, true and just.
The charge that what Straw said was, ipso facto, “racist” is pernicious nonsense. To believe that is to believe that any criticism of Islam, of Muslims, and of the beliefs, customs and practices of Muslim communities, is, per se, racist! There is more than an echo of the affair of the Danish cartoons in the outcry of the kitsch-left and Islamic chauvinists against Straw.
Even a Government minister like Jack Straw should be defended against misrepresentation by the Muslim bigots, and their kitsch-left and invertebrate-liberal toadies, who make that charge. We must insist that he has the right to say such things, without being subjected to hysterical accusations of “racism”.
They are openly discussing Islam and its impact on British life in a way that for a long time was ruled out by both “political correctness” and fear of unleashing chauvinists and racists eager to attack easily identifiable Muslim people with dark skin.
Islam, militant political-religious Islam, has exerted a relentless pressure for others to accommodate to its norms and standards - most dangerous, as Solidarity has argued, their de facto demand for the suppression of the long-accepted standards of free speech, freedom to write and publish novels like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, free criticism of religion etc.
Straw, Blair, Phil Woolas etc are confronting Muslims with the suggestion, if not the demand, that the accommodation on some of these questions should be the other way around.
They may be signalling a break with the long-dominant invertebrate-liberal “cultural relativism” which in its extreme form pretends that one culture, mindset, religion is just as good as another. Thereby the cultural relativists abjured judgement.
Thereby they signalled willingness to abandon for some people — including women in the Islamic communities, or, in the notorious Victoria Climbie case, children in certain African Christian sects — and for some areas of British society, the standards it has taken British people centuries to win.
The assertion by such as Straw that the assumptions of British liberal democracy — day to day secularism, a world where citizenship includes women’s rights as citizens, and that this world is better than that of traditional Islam — can easily be denounced as “chauvinism”, “racism” and “Islamophobia”.
At issue here are matters of judgement, choice, preferment - including the choice to let oneself, or refuse to let oneself, be driven from reasoning, and reasoned discussed, about important issues by the use of such labels.
The case against Straw et al is also strong.
Is it appropriate for a minister or ministers to start a discussion on the hijab which cannot but — initially at least — and indeed has, licenced an open-season on Muslims for those want to target them?
Is it appropriate to have a government minister, Ruth Kelly, a devout member of the vicious Catholic cult Opus Dei, lecturing Muslims about religious self-exclusion? In any case, it is very, very odd. It cannot but give a religion-vs-religion tincture to the criticism of Muslims. One writer has said that Kelly, the would-be Opus Dei member (except that it is too reactionary to let her, a mere woman, join!) observes the necessary distinction, which many Muslims do not, between religion and politics. Things like the hijab are by no means clearly and distinctly political. In any case this claim is somewhat problematic.
Is it appropriate to have a Prime Minister who is himself a crypto-Catholic (and who very likely will openly become a Catholic once he is out of office) and whose government is doing great social harm by encouraging the spread of faith schools (and who sends his children to a selective Catholic school) — is it right to have such a Prime Minister lecture society about religiously-inspired division? In any case it is at least as odd for Blair as for Kelly to do it.
Is it appropriate for Blair and Kelly, who are reportedly fighting a last ditch battle in the cabinet against extending gay rights, to lecture Muslims, or any other religious group, about the separation of politics and religion?
If it can be argued that it is right for the government to start such a discussion, and despite initially stimulating chauvinists and racists, the exertion of social pressure on Islam which it is applying is ultimately good (as now I tend to think) it is simply not true that the division can simply be attributed to Muslim exclusiveness.
It is to radically misrepresent — by way of stark one-sidedness — how things stand between the Muslim communities and the broader British society.
It is not just their religious observances that “distance” and separate the Muslim communities, Muslim women included, but also the social realities of Blair and Straw’s Britain. Unemployment and discrimination, for instance
It may be true that people of a common background and a common distinct religion, will naturally, like Irish immigrants in Kilburn, Camden or Archway, tend to come together. For that natural tendency to produce the level of Muslim ghettoisation we have in Britain, requires in addition, the hostile pressures — and not only against their religion — which abound in our society towards dark skinned foreign people.
Dark-skinned Muslim people are victims in this society. They are easy targets. Straw has shown just how easy a target they are. Shamelessly racist newspapers, like the Express — one of a number of similar headlines: “Muslims pledge to ruin Straw”! — have weighed-in to turn his words into denunciation, blame-mongering, thinly disguised hate-mongering against identifiable Muslims.
The serious left has to combine the fight against racism and bigotry against Muslim people with appropriate hostility to their ideas, and towards the Muslim clerical-fascist political formations. If we cannot combine these things, but must, as the kitsch left insists, in order to fight racism, subordinate ourselves to reactionary Islamic religious and clerical-fascist formations, then we commit political suicide. If we deny ourselves the right to freely criticise Islam, or any other religion, that self-effacement is also a form of political suicide.
Criticising and denouncing Islam, we have nothing in common with those who are hostile to Muslim people .
The first concern of socialists and secularists in this business must be to the defend the right of Muslims to practice their religion without harassment, bullying, or hate mongering.
Of course, it is necessary to continue to defend the right to criticise religion and religious practices — for example the way certain African religious sects treat children — without the critic being automatically labelled and dismissed as a racist. Secularists, socialists and feminists also criticise the hijab as a social institution which is discriminatory against women.
On the left now all critical thought, all critical awareness on such questions, is drowned out by loud choruses of “racist!” One need only read the hysterical reactions of the SWP press. Any criticism or explicit dissent from Islam is “racism” to these increasingly demented people.
The secularist fight against Islam, as against all religion, is only hindered when rational discussion is contaminated and poisoned by ethnic and national hatreds. When criticism of Islam, or say, Catholicism, the religion of the large recent Polish group of migrants into Britain — is a mere mask for chauvinism and racism.
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Faith in Science
Why say what has already been said before;
"In science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, may they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realms of knowledge - though always under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But this does not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its' own sake. It is clear that science too rests on faith; there is no science without presuppositions. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the princible, the faith, the conviction is expressed: "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value."
This unconditional truth: what is it?... What do you know in advance of the character of existence, to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditional mistrustful or of the unconditional trusting? Yet if both are required, much trust and much mistrust: whence might science then takes its' unconditional faith, its' conviction, on which it rests, that truth is more important than anything else, even than any other conviction? Just this conviction could not have come into being if both truth and untruth showed themselves to be continually useful, as is the case. Thus, though there undeniably exists a faith in science, it cannot owe its origin to such a utilitarian calculus but it must rather have origanated in spite of the fact that the inutility and dangerousness of the "will to truth," of "truth at any price," are proved to it continually...
Consequently, "will to truth" does not mean "I will not let myself be decieved" but - there is no choice - "I will not deceive, not even myself": and with this we are on the ground of morality. For one should ask oneself carefully: "Why don't you want to decieve?" especially if it should appear - that life depends on appearance: I mean, on error, simulation, deception, self-deception; and when life has, as a matter of fact, always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi. Such an intent, charitably interpreted, could perhaps be a quixotism, a little enthusiastic impudence; but it could also be something worse, namely, a destructive principle, hostile to life. "Will to truth"- that might be a concealed will to death.
Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem, "For what end any morality at all" if life, nature and history are "not moral"?...But one will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it always remains a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests- that even we devotees of knowledge today, we godless ones and anti metaphysicians, still take our fire too from the flame which a faith thousands of years old has kindled: that Christian faith, which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth, that truth is divine..." Nietzsche
It is not our questions which need answering, but our answers which need questioning.
Critisism of religion
Critisism of religion and religious traditions is clearly not racism. However, such critisisms are often hijacked by racists and religious zealots alike. Few people are under any illusions about fascists' and religious bigots' credentials regarding freedom of speach or pretty much any other freedom for that matter.If we fail to recognise the difference between politicised religious extremists and 'rank and file' members of any particular religion we risk alienating good working class people against socialist ideas. Marx teaches us that religion is the symptom not the disease. Religion will exist as long as the conditions that give rise to it persist; to blame the religious for their religion is something like blaming the poor for their poverty. That is why i think that while being critical of religion we should also be sure not to alienate those who still cling to their religion. If we fail to recognise differences such as 'muslim' and 'islamist' I think we are certain to fall into that trap.
Why don't we blame the poor for thier poverty?
In fact I do, but thier poverty is a lack of knowledge. When the majority is suffering the majority is ignorant. There is no difference between moderate and extremist in the world of ideas, only right and wrong. Wrong ideas will lead to wrong actions as right ideas to right actions. How far people cling to thier false beliefs will determine how long they will suffer. But above all else the truth must survive in order for humanity to do likewise.
I did mean "looked like
I did mean "looked like Muslims". The point being that at least some of the other passengers thought they looked like Muslims and therefore might be terrorists.
If someone "looked like a terrorist", I could only assume that meant they were visibly carrying a bomb. How else could you look like a terrorist other than in the eyes of a bigot?
racism
At a time when Muslims are under attack, you should side with the oppressed, not equivocate about whose side your on. "Criticising and denouncing islam" puts you on the wrong side, whatever else you say.
E.G not I.E, D.H
I.e would mean I specified a belief in heaven and hell, but as you know I believe only in what I have experianced, and since I havn't died yet I can't comment. But unlike you I do not completely discount the possibility, the coin is tossed, I believe equally the chance of either side but I can never "know" until it lands.
I am not saying you are nihilist now, but it is the only outcome within a wholly physical world which your philosophy can arrive at. Whether or not you believe in something now, you are saying you will cease to exist as this "corpreal entity" and as existance is a prerequisite of belief, to not exist as something is to be unable to believe in anything, nihilism. Do I believe in a metaphysical "spiritual" world? I can only tell you when we're both dead, and I defy any living being to tell me otherwise, for us the coin has not yet landed
I Think That is Clear
I think you have made your position clear. You have collpased into religion and spiritualism. A rather amusing conclusion to your ideas from your starting point.
Arthur Bough
Ok
How somebody with a primary school education can come to such a conclusion is beyond me. Where, in anything that I have said, has there been any belief in anything slightly religious? Faith has no part in my philosophy, although the same may not be said for yours'.
When You Have Lost Resort to Insults
Martina, I see that having lost the argument you are forced to resort to insults. Where is there anything in what you have said that is religious??? All of the latter part of your argument!!! You began by denouncing in the most vehement tones anyone that even gave consideration to the possibility of the existence of God, and yet end by being reduced even openly to the most cringeing agnosticism tellingt us that you will tell us if there is life after death when you have died. That after you have told us that in order to avoid nihilism it is necessary to posit the idea that the consciousness, the ability to think can only be avoided if this conscioussness goes on for ever!!!!
And you ask where have you suggested a belief in God????
But why stop there with your cringeing agnosticism where after all all hope of salvation is equally lost?
Let us look at your propositions.
1. You only accept the idea of absolute truth
2. You will only accept as being true that which you have experienced
3. You accept that your senses cannot be relied upon because they can deceive you.
4. The only real truth that you can accept, therefore, is not truth as derived from the material world which depends upon reliance on these unreliable senses.
But what does this lead us to? I have already explained it to you, and you have been unable to reply. If the only truth is the truth contained within the idea, then we have to ask from where does this idea derive. The idea can only in your argument here derive from one of two places. Either the idea is placed in my mind by God, or the idea is itself merely a production of my own mind, and therefore an aspect of it. Such an idea could have no existence outside of my own being, or outside the being of God.
But you cannot allow yourself to believe in "God" as some separate being because you have no experience of this God that you can trust. The only experience of anything upon which you can rely is the experience of "I". But having experiecned "I" you are still unable to define its nature, or even to say whether this "I" is absolute, or whether it is itself subject to constant change, and if so it must therefore, be constantly coming into being never equal to itself, and therefore non-absolute.
You then have a choice. You can accept that your philosophy ends in the most pessimistic nihilism because the one thing you thought you could beleive in absolutely turns out to be as ephemeral as everything else, or else you posit the absoluteness of this "I" as the one unchanging Truth in which you can believe. But there is only one definition appropriate to a singularity of that sort, a one unchanging Absolute Truth, and that is God. Your philosophy leaves you believing in nothing at all, or believing that you are God.
Arthur Bough
The Theist, The Agnostic and The Atheist
"agnostic, quite possibly." Martina Daycoi
I think I already made the agnostic assertion. Agnosticism is not religious and does not denote religious beliefs, in fact it is athiesm which is more inclined to rely on faith and the unproven. Where as an agnostic admits that we may or may not be able to know god, athiests are in complete oppostion to the idea of a god, based on what? Based on the fact that they have not experianced such a thing (sound familiar?)? Where I agree that we have not yet encountered a Diety I cannot discount the posibility that we may. Maybe God's a black swan. Now this would be a contradiction if I had denounced the idea of the possibility of a god, but I did not, meerly the beliefs based on the false belief that one exists for certian. You and the religious of this world sit at either ends of the spectrum of metaphysical belief. On both sides lacks rational logical proof suffiecent enough to subdue the oppossition. Only the possibility remains, the agnostic position. I defy anybody who claims a god does exist, and equally anybody who claims that one does not. How this can entail religious belief is beyond me. This, as you are right in pointing out does not defeat nihilism, but it does not condem humanity to it either. I may continue to exist, I may not, who knows? (and thats not rhetorical). I will prove I is "I" in the definition I have given tommorrow and the possibilities which we are presented from such a method of thinking.
Fence Sitters of the World Unite
The agnostic is just the atheist afraid of going to hell. But as I pointed out although even openly you acknowledge agnosticism which puts you at least half-way towards those you reviled for their religion your actual argument leaves you wholly in the camp of the religious. I note that elaboration of your argument you have avoided discussing.
Arthur Bough
The Optimist, Me and the The Pessemist
Remember it is you who fears nihilism, not me. I don't care either way. Either there is a god who can answer my questions or I become non-exist, but which ever conclusion this life presents me I will only know (or be rendered unable to know) when I die. Does this mean that in order to avoid nihilism I have to believe in a life after death? Yes, but the nature or point of this life I cannot know, only the possibility. Your definite (but unproven) nihilism, or my (provable) possible nihilism. You condemn mankind to nothingness, I say no, the future is uncertian.
What is "I"?
Simply put, I is not IT, but the ability to percieve I and IT. Either you can percieve IT, and therefore I within IT, or you cann't. This is AN absolute truth, but who am I to say whether it is THE absolute truth.
No Its Not
No its not. I was quite happy with the notion that "I" am not the same as the Universe, that the ceasing of my existence is the same as the ceasing of all existence, that my ceasing to exist meant that all thought ceased rather than just my thought. It was you that argued that the ceasing of one individual was the greatest nihilism, not me.
I do not condemn mankind to nothingness only men I would have thought that with your philosophical knowledge you would be aware of the difference. Once again you accept that in order to avoid nihilism you have to accept belief in life after death, but then you come up against a logical contradiction. Not only does such an admittance make a mockery of your antagonism to all those at the beginning of this discussion who similarly believed in a life after death - even one whose nature was unknown to them - but it also contradicts your requirement that you can only beleive in something of which you have experience. As you agree that you have not experienced such life after death you cannot believe in it, and even to admit its possibility undermines the whole of your argument. What point is there in believing in the possibility of something if the whole of your philosophy is based upon absolute truth which requires not possibility but certainty.
As for your definition of "I" this is just round the mulberry bush stuff again, a repetition of an argument already had and to which you had no answer. "I" cannot be defined as you claim consistent with your philosophy and arguments. "I" here is confined to something undefinable something which can only perceive. But what is doing the perceiving, how do you know the perception is not changing merely giving the illusion of continuity like a moving picture is merely an illusion created by many separate pictures. How do you know that what is doing the perceiving is not changing - sometimes movie projectors have to be changed, and even when they don't the projector itself undergoes change. Because you cannot "experience" "I", because you cannot define it in absolute terms you cannot believe in it "absolutely" because to do so contravenes your requirement for experience. You cannot experience in an absolute sense something which is constantly changing because the thing itself never exists absolutely but only as a process of continually coming into being.
You are left with no definition of "I", "IT" or "Perception" compatible with your own requirements. The only rational conclusion of that is for you to accept that your position is nihilistic. But you refuse to do that and instead continue to argue not from the position of certainty, but from the position of possibility which again contradicts your own stated method. What does this assertion of the nature of "I" then amount to under those condiitons it amounts to nothing more than a statement of faith, a statement that "I" exists and I "believe" that this is its nature i.e. the ability to perceive itself and "IT". But as I have shown you have no grounds from your philosophy, and from your propositions to arrive at such a conclusion you can only do so by an act of faith rather than logic. Your position is not logical it is religious.
And your assertion that the only thing that can be known absolutely is the existence of "I" - even though in reality you can only have faith in the absolute truth of "I" - does leave you arguing that this is the one and only "Absolute Truth", or at least that even were any other absolute truths to somehow be deducible, they can only be deducible from this primary Absolute Truth, and that is precisely what theologians claim for God.
Arthur Bough
What is nothing?
I is the consiousness. If we loose consiousness we loose everything. Therefore I is everything and I is not nothing. What is nothing like? Or what is like nothing? Nothing. It is unexperianced. I is no more than what is undoubtable. Although I of the past may be fabricated, I of the future an illussion, I right here right now is indubitable. Of course only I can validate my own existence in the present, as you can only yours, consiousness is an on/off switch, you either exist and make a mockery of reason, logic and langauge by questioning I, or nothing. Whether the universe follows us into nothing when we pass (as you seems to think I believe) or it doesn't, we may never know in this life or a finite existence. You cannot lie to I because I is lying. You cannot question whether I exists, because I is questioning. Maybe I am changing, maybe I am not, maybe it only appears I am not changing, but the one thing for certian throughout is that I am (and quite possibly only in the present moment, but still, I am). I do not attach special importance to this I (more than what it is), it is you, who unable to answer the questions set out in the Meditations, have in reality taken Descartes nihilistic position for denouncing that which we can be certian of. Descartes no more advances our knowledge of knowledge and our uncertianties thereof than the early skeptics of ancient Greece. I do not state the above as belief or opinion but as fact.
Fence sitter? Coming from the Trotskyist third camper? Don't make me laugh. I maybe on the fence but you are still "GRADUALLY" getting to the garden. Let me know when you get here.
What is Right here and now
You say I of the past can be fabricated whereas I of the future is an illusion. You leave yourslef with a belief only in the absoluteness of "I" right here right now. But I have demonstrated the problem for you before of this position. What is right here, right now. As soon as you consider "now" it is gone it is the past, and no longer "now" you cannot consider now as being some time about to arrive because that is the future. "Now" is merely a cocnept a facet of human language we use to describe something undescribable a moment in time which cannot exist. No matter how small a period of time you try to reduce "Now" down to it will always have a beginning an end end to that period of time. It will always then be possible to divide this period of "Now" down into smaller "Nows". For each of these "NOws" the beginning will always be continually in the past no sooner has it arrived as the end will be in the future as you wait for it to arrive.
That is the nature of reality constant flux, it is why no conception of "I" can exist purely in a "Now", because "Now" does not exist other than as a cocnept. "I" can only exist in time which s itself a process a continual movement, and consequently everything that exists in time including "I" is subject to continual change too. And because uit is continual it can never have any constant state can never be equal to itself, and can consequently never be considered in absolute terms.
The rest of your paragraph here is just mystical mumbo jumbo typical of someone whose inability to come to terms with the fact that there theory is in shreds and has been reduced to believe purely on the basis of "faith".
I do not take Descartes position. I reject the idea of absolutes for the reasons I have outlined and because as you will see from your own attempts to defend the idea of absolutes you are inevitably drawn to a religious philosophy a belief in some Absolute being from which such absolutes derive. Unlike you I am happy, however, to recognise that on the basis of experiment, observation and hte use of logic it is possible to establish hypotheses about ghow the Universe operates, and to test them so as to obtain some limited udnerstanding upon which it is possible to orientate action. I am happy given sufficient grounds for doing so to even take some hypthoses as being sufficiently well proved as to treat them as temporary absolutes on which to act, or to treat them as absolutes within certain limitations.
For example, I am happy to take the idea that the world is spherical as absolutely true for such purposes as this is relevant. However, when trying to level a snooker table or erect a shelf I will operate as though the world were perfectly flat.
Fence sitter yes absoluely that is what you are, and your post above re-confirms it, but one ita ppears whose philosophy and worse inability to admit when it has failed is collapsing into religion. As for TRotskyist, Third Camper etc. besides the fact its hardly an argument, I suggest you read some of my posts on those matters.
Arthur Bough
I is the crest of a wave
I is the crest of a wave. It cannot fall into the past and it cannot advance randomly into the future. Let me get what you're saying, there is no now? How can anything exist without a now? Time may be divisible into infinite parts but it still advances. I see you side step another one of my questions, that being what does nothing feel like? Answer that and you have your I.
Once again it is you who holds the religious views. If a religion is a system of beliefs on the unfounded, I doesn't exist (according to you) then you presuposse logic. What confuses me is that on the one hand you accuse me of religious beliefs and on the other you say that I am a nihilist and have no belief. In reality it is you who demonstrates both similtanioulsy in your arguments against the skeptic. I hold firm to the skeptical position and challenge anybody to answer Descartes questions.
My beliefs may sit on the fence, but my actions do not. The opposite is true of yourself. One last question, where do you get your morals or values from?
Tangents
The crest of a wave is like a tangent touching the circumference of a circle. At that point the angle of the tangent is equal to the angle of the circle. A contradiction as a circle cannot be equal to a straight line! But nevertheless true in reality. How can anything exist without a now? A contradiction, but one which is true in reality. Time advances BECAUSE it is divisible into an infinite number of parts just as all motion occurs because it is divisible into an infinite number of smaller movements. Time is in reality not simply the sum of an infinite number of infinitely small moments any more than motion is an infinite number of infinitely small movements both are continuous processes, change is continual which is why there is in reality no NOW, and no single point which constitutes the crest.
That is why there can be no absolutes because an absolute requires lack of change, absence of process.
I do not need to answer your question what does nothing feel like because it is not me that is obsessed with "I". It is you that are left with only "I" to beleive in because your skepticism leaves you with nothing else to cling to. You are left with only "I" that you can base yourself on because your dead end philosophy forces you to retreat ever more into only that which you can prove exists, and on which absolute truth rests. But I have demonstrated above that not even this "I" is absolute because it whatever it is is subject to process to change too.
You have a choice. Either your philosophy leads you to nihilism because you cannot even beleive that this "I" exists as an absolute truth and retain your philosophic proinciples, or else you resort to a belief in "I" despite that, abandoning your philosophic principles in order to escape the nihilistic conclusions, and collpase into religion to maintain your insistence on a search for the Absolute. Yet again rather than make a choice you sit on the fence.
I do not deny the existence of "I" at all as you claim. On the contrary. But I do define this "I" in materialistic not religious terms as you do. I have no requirement in order to build a workable philosophy - i.e. one which gives a useful interpretation of existence, and on which decisions for action can be based - of your search for absolutes or need to define "I" in absolute or mystical terms. I am quite happy to define "I" not just in materialist, but in dialectical terms not as an absolute, but as something like everything else as subject to change.
You claim that your actions do not sit on the fence, but you would have to epxlain what actions they are, and how they flow logically from your philosophy. The reality is that were you to act consistently upon your philosophy you could in fact take no actions because you would never be able to ascertain whether your actions were based on real knowledge or not. You would be like the philosopher stuck in the deep pit who when a rope was thrown down to him sat there for weeks trying to decide what the rope was in reality before deciding that it was after all just a rope. That just about sums up the usefulness of your philosophy.
Arthur Bough
=
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EvErY BoDiEs GoInG SuRfInG
The contradiction of the tangent is only more evidence of an uncertian external, not an uncertian existence. For in order to "discover" this contradiction we primarily have to exist in order to contemplate the problem. In reality, existence preceeds the material world, it has to in order to be able to percieve such a world, otherwise there would be no reality. Argue all you like but nobody percieves anything from outside thier own perception ie; outside of thier own mind, in the present. Far from there being no now in reailty, now IS reality.
You do not need to answer the question? I believe it is more a case of not wanting to or being unable to. Being unable to define nothing is fair enough, I doubt anybody could, that is a real contradiction, to exist and to not exist similtaneously or in succession. But not wanting to answer, stopping short again?
Nothing is unexperiencable, but I am continually percieving and experiencing, therefore I is not nothing since I percieve and experience through I. To experience requires a perciever and a perception, therefore I is something and not everything but can not be nothing. Either I (perception and experience of something) or nothing. I may change, I may not, but I always exists. An always afirming absolute. Even if I changed into a completely different person, "he" would still have to exist, and he being the I of the future, what would he call himself, I or him? We already know, he is I, always in the now, always on the crest.
Aside from the mythical nessecity of the time, the Apology by Plato and the first two chapters of the Meditations by Descartes sum up the core to the philosophy.
"I have convinced myself that there is nothing in the world - no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Doesn't it follow that I don't exist? No, surely I must exist if it's me who is convinced of something. But there is a deceiver, supremely powerful and cunning whose aim is to see that I am always deceived. But surely I exist, if I am deceived. Let him deceive me all he can, he will never make it the case that I am nothing while I think that I am something. Thus having fully weighed every consideration, I must finally conclude that the statement "I am, I exist" must be true whenever I state it or mentally consider it." Descartes Meditations II
"I regard this as a proof that what has happened to me is a good, and that those of us who think that death is an evil are in error. This is a great proof to me of what I am saying, for the customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good. Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?
Still I have a favor to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, - then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows". Plato Apology
No Cigar
Parmenides was a big influence on Socrates' philosophy so of course it appears similar, but where Parmenides draws conclusions(absurd conclusions to say the least), Socrates remains blissfully ignorant, and rightly so. If our senses can lie, if knowledge is as I believe riddled with inncosistances and paradox's, if you or anybody cannot prove ultimatley that the universe and everything about it does not stop at the edge of our (my, if we're getting technical) mind(s), then skeptisism is true. From deductive reasoning. You can refute the absoluteness of "I" and "IT", but that is all you can attack, and even then it doesn't answer the skeptic/knowlegde question. Whether I is absolute or not it is continualy being experienced, it is nesseceraly there, it is a thinking thing, as thinking is absolutly NOT nothing it exists, therefore;
If the thinking thing thinks, it is an absolute truth that it must also exist.
The present doesn't exist? That still makes me laugh. I don't need to prove the present exists, the words I am typing are proving that to me now. Time maybe made of infintesimatly smaller parts, but time moves, it has to or existence would be like a stalled computer game, we would be "lost in the moment".
Does this mean I am god? Where d'you get such ludicrious conclusions from? If I can only be certian of my own existence then you're not getting me to say that I am certian I am god. This now leaves us in the position where we can start viewing the world from the view of an individualist. Where Marx has taken the society to the individual, "I" takes the individual to the society.
Your Confused
You say the idea that the present doesn't exist makes you laugh but then go on to give exactly the proof that it doesn't. The very fact that existence does not get "stalled in the moment" demonstrates that there are no moments that are fixed integers, that time is constantly moving, so there can be no present because as soon as it arrives it has gone, the very fact that it does not freeze "stalled in the moment" is the very proof you have given of that.
Consequently, whatever it is that experiences "I" is constantly experiencing not the same "I" but some different "I", but of course unable to identify the existence of anyhting other than "I" you are left with the fact that "I" does not experience itself, but "IS". BUt because "I" is itself constantly changing what "I" "IS" is alsoways soemthing else. At the same time "I" "IS", and yet "I" "ISN'T". Even this basic absolute truth you want to cling to can give you no grip because it is constantly shifting sand, it is not and never can be the absolute you require. So if the one thing you can point to as an absolute turns out not to be what does that leave you with in your skepticism and demand for absolute truth? A situation where the one thing you thought you could count on as an absolute truth isn't. In short you are left with nothing you can beleive in within your own terms of reference. Nihilism.
But you reject nihilism, you say. What is the alternative? You must conclude that despite your own argument that time is constantly moving, that therefore the present cannot exist, and that everything that exists in time is itself constantly changing never equal to itself that your own personal "I" stands outside all of this. That your own personal "I" is indeed absolute. But that requires it not only stands outside the material world, but also stands outside time. What else can we describe something that stands outside of time, and space, and which is absolute other than GOD.
But as I said before this just gores round the mulberry bush once again of the argument you have yet to find a way out of for yourslef - because indeed there is no way out. But even if there were, so what? What would your philosophy achieve. In the end absoluetly nothing. It is a pedantic tour of hopelessness, and despair of absolutely no practical use for anyone let alone those of us trying not just to reinterpret the world, but to change it.
Arthur Bough
The Great Oppression (and the not so great oppressed)
When man, far from freeing himself as the apendage of the machine, believes that he is the machine, when his responsibilities are absolved by his natural conclusions of the external world, when morals and ethics crumble to dust and civilization along with it, that is why I argue for this philosophy and the importance of philosophy in general. For as long as man continues to follow blindly like sheep the actions of others and accuses these others for his own mistakes, to live in any society and blame his current status on anything else but himself, that is why "I" is important. "I" is the base for all existence and all value.
There is no such thing as a selfless action. There is no substitute for experiance. There is no experiance without existence.
What is life? Millions of societies and communities or 6 billion "I"s? It would be nice if you could give me your definition of socialism as I suspect that it derives from an idealist/individualist moral stand point, in which case you have been arguing against yourself all this time (although whether you are aware of your self deception is questionable).
Are you sure about that?
What then, if not an amalgamation of individuals is a society?
"Understanding" a society
"Understanding" a society was not the point in question, it is what makes or rather what constitutes a society. The individual can exist seperate from society (nomadic loners for example) but society cannot exist without the individuals. That is the only point I am making. Your atoms (viz. individuals) are capable of innumerable configurations of molecules, but without atoms they would not even have the potentiality to evolve into more complex structures. The atoms, I's, the molecules, castes, sects, classes, the society, as you so adequetly put, a piece of matter. You cannot change the matter, it is an alloyage of the classes and sects, and you cannot change these sects, they are made of, what? Look at it another way, when you saw a table in half, you can destroy the table, and split the wood fibres and molecules, but the atoms will remain, (lets not get into nuclear fission and quantum mechanics). A changed world will first require a changed people, a changed society is a result to this change.
Although working backwards, as Marx did, to ascertain the genisis of a fact/perception of human behaviour is (if a little skeptical) a valid method of discovery, it presupposes objectivity while dismissing proven subjectivity. This in turn objectifies humanity with the extreme possibility of our good friends nihilism or religion resulting as a result from our inability to cope from our non-sensical existence. Either that or you'll turn humanity into a load of machines. The vast majority of people live in a world such as this because they have a false belief that they have to. Far from fence sitting this philosophy encourages the urgency for change while not dismissing that which we cannot be sure of. I encourge people to see for themselves, to explore into everything, but more important than this, to keep exploring. Experience and education is more important than non-experience and ignornce, it is the way we know the one thing for certain and how the many things make sense and work in relation to us. "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I'll remember. Involve me and I'll understand".
I don't look at the slices
I look at the ingredients. When you change society does that not equate to the same as changing the mass of individuals? In your hypothesis then it is society alone which determines and shapes the individual. Lets look logically then at this assertion.
A is A because of B and C.
B is B because of A and C
and
C is C because of A and B.
It's chicken and egg without the egg. In your view society came into existence before social beings. Aside from the disturbing belief that all my actions are somebody elses' (which makes everybody a murderer, rapist, thief, ect) it gives us no clue into how these societies are constructed. Presupposition, as I believe Marx concurred to in Das Kapital. There are only two alternatives as far as I can see. Either free will and human spirit created and continues to create society, or else humanity is (and was) a blank slate inscribed on by an outside force, a divine agent say. I favour the former, a world less religious, less presupposed and with more choice.
Of course society (or rather the thoughts, ideas, actions and feelings of other individuals) has the potential to change my existence, but first I must allow it to change me. We live how we live because we choose to, not because we are told to. There are no human rights, only human power and there is always choice. That is the beauty of life, and one pure mechanistic Marxists seem intent on destroying.
You Really Should Try Reading Marx
If you actually read Marx rather than trying to second guess what you think he might have written you would save yourself and me a lot of time.
Your syllogistic logic in your examples of A's, B's and C's, is part of why you are unable to see the woord for the trees. All science recognises processes of feedback, the process whereby cause becomes effect, and effect becomes cause. Yes society comes into existence in its own right, and is not some agglomeration of individuals, which even in your syllogistic world simply could not have happened.
But society like everything else is subject to change. Marx sets out exactly what the process of change is, and modern anthropolgy has confirmed his thesis. That is Man developed tools in order to hunt, and gather better. The very process, together with the discover of fire that enabled food to be cooked, set in motion a process of human development in the brain that ultimately led to Modern Man.
There in itself is a process of feedback occurring. Man develops tools. Cause. Effect changes in diet and the need to communicate and develop higher brain functions. Becomes Cause. Effect changes in the nature of Man.
But of course the process did not stop there. Changes in Man i.e. ability to think and speak. Cause. Effect, further revolutionising of the means of production. Effect. Production of a social surplus i.e. more produced than needs to be immediately consumed. Becomes Cause. Effect. Possibility of possessing slaves who can now produce more than the cost of their maintenance, and ability of a section of society not to work, to become chiefs, medicine men etc. Becomes Cause. Effect change in the nature of human society, ending of primitive communist stage of human development, and replacement by class society i.e. slave holding society. Becomes cause. Change in the ideas held in the minds of Men i.e. bifurcation between slave owners and slaves, rulers and ruled. And so on, and so on until we reach capitaism.
There is no chicked and egg in this situation. Your argument agin is religious. It simply cannot accept the idea that things whether they be the Universe, matter or human society can exist fully formed without some process of construction.
How you come to the conclusion that everybody is a rapist and so on I have no idea. The interaction between society as a whole and the classes and individuals it breaks down into is a complex one. Society as a whole as the process I have outlined above sets certain overall laws within which development takes place. Certainly society, and the laws and relations that develop within it react back on individuals. But that reacting back is not a straightforward one to one mechanical relationship. Each individual has a different physical make-up, and individual experiences which also conditions thee way they react. But nevertheless, there is virtually no serious social scientist that does not believe that certain societal states do not tend to create certain types of behaviour within certain types of individuals. It is not a coincidence for example that in times of high unemployment that crime such as theft increases - and whatever the Tories might have wanted to portray that was just as true during the 1930's as it was during the 1980's, just that the potential for theft of consumer goods etc. was far more restricted at that time. But in a programme shown on TV a few years ago, one of the Krays associates Mad Frankie Fraser retold how during the War, villains in London had a field day walking into people's houses and stealing ration books etc.
As for it not giving an udnerstanding of how societies are constructed, the very opposite is the case as I have demonstrated above. It is the nonsensical idea that societies are constructed simply as a summation of individuals that not only can give us no udnerstanding of how or why societies take the shape they do, where classes come from, and how the classes within those societies relate to each other.
And there are not just two alternatives as you would realise if you had ever read Marx. There is a third alternative. Man creates his own history, but under conditions not of his own choosing. Society comes into existence and man with it. Man tries to survive, and needs to work, to produce. But the conditions for doing so are not ones he would choose, not ones he at first has any control over. The way he produces is then not just a matter of his free will, but the material constraints palced upon it, by the given historical conditions he finds himself in. But Man himself then becomes a factor in those material conditions, changing them, and thereby creating his own history. But each generation of Man still faces that same problem that although it creates its own history, it does so constrained by the means of production and historical conditions previous generations of men have left. That is the whole point of dialectal change. It is the whole basis of understanding history through Historical materialsm.
Of course every individual has choice, but it is not free choice, it is constrained choice. For some the choices are more free than for others. The millionaire and the beggar are both free to sleep under the railway arches. But the millionaire is more likely to sleep in his penthouse apartment, whilst that choice is not one the beggar is free to make.
Arthur Bough
two worlds
"There is no difference between moderate and extremist in the world of ideas..." (Martina Daycoi)
Maybe not in the world of ideas. However, in the world of workaday life, of bringing up the kids and wondering where the money for the next bill is coming from, in the world of having been brought up by good honest working class people who happen to adhere to religious beliefs, in the real world of millions of working class christians, jews, hindus, muslims sikhs etc. there is one hell of a difference.
Janine
You hit the nail on the head, "other than in the eyes of a bigot". To leap to such an extreme conclusion through (irrational) reason displays just how biggoted and ignorant the hysterical were and very certianly are still being.
Most Asians are Muslim or most Muslims are Asian.
Some Muslims are extremist in that they have been known to blow up planes
Therefore
These two men may be Muslim (based on colour alone, bigotted?) and may be planning to blow up this plane.
It probably took a true racist to air his views to spark off the rest of the plane to realise thiers. It's ironic (and obviously destressing for the accused) to think that the most endangered people on that plane were those that were feared the most.
But life is more complicated
But life is more complicated than "pick one of two sides". I do absolutely side with those under attack from racism. But I also absolutely side with those under attack from sexist oppression - like many millions of women who are suffering oppression through the imposition of Sharia law. And I do absolutely side with those suffering for the right of freedom of thought and expression - like those who are condemned under sharia law for being "apostates". And I do absolutely side with those who are trying to rebuild the workers' movement in Iraq despite coming under attack from militant islamist gangs who want to destroy independent working class organisation and coming under attack from the US occupation and the US-backed Iraqi government who want to suppress any potiential development of working class democracy.
How do I express *all* these opinions in a catchy slogan? Well, I can't. But that doesn't make them unnecessary opinions.
But Not Absolutely
"I" may indeed continue to exist, but it is ot the same "I", and yet it is. It is trhe same "I", but not absolutely the same "I" because it has perpetually changed. My argument is not that "I" is nothing, but that "I" is never equal to "I" it cannot be an absolute, therefore.
Your problem is two fold. You insist on an absolute. But this ultimately resolves itself into a belief in an absolute something or an absolute nothing. An Absolute something can only be God. A belief in an absolute nothing is nihilism. Herein lies the second part of your problem that no amount of quotes from Plato can resolve for you. Because you insist on only accepting that which you have experienced and can know "absolutely" to be true you can in reality know nothing, because you accept that your senses can deceive you, so there is no way of knowing that what you percieve is absolutely true.
You must reject materialism, therefore, and that you clearly spell out in your post above. But that leaves you with just the certain knowledge of "I". But as I have demonstrated now several times although you can know of the existence of "I" you cannot know its nature, and as everything is subject to change even this "I" is not absolute. Only one option then is left for you to beleive that this "I" is absolute, unchanging, and existing outside time. That time, the material world and everuthing is is merely a mirage a figment of the imaginiation of this absolute unchanging "I". As I said you are left with a belief that you are God.
But that just reiterates the argument, and there is little point continuing this debate if it involves continually going over the same ground.
Arthur Bough
The problem is not the religion...
The problem is not the religion, or a particular religious system.
A religious system is (often) as a car pulled by horses who run to opposite directions. See, to speak about Catholic Church the huge diference between, for instance Camilo Torres, who was a catholic father and "guerrillero" in Colombia and, for instance the father Ecriva Balaguer Opus Dei founder...
Personally I'm not concerned with religious pratice. I am more concerned with the free speech about religion, about a particular religious system. And at this point appears the so called "cultural relativism", a concept that is beeing the "Moloch" of all who want stop the free speech about religious matters. For sure, I am a cultural relativist, however my cultural relativism stop at the moment who someone wants end my right to free speech about the issues I want. Cultural relativism, as it is easy to understand is a concept that needs to have appropriated use.
Well, for now it's all I wanted post.
Thanks for your attention and, please, be indulgent with my poor english.
Antonio Lico,
What it is not
It certainly is not the individualist belief that all society is merely the sum of billions of "I's", the position incidentally put forward by that well known socialist Margaret Thatcher when she stated that there was no such thing as society. So now we find you not only supporting reactionary idealist beleifs such as religion, but also reactionary individualists beleifs such as those put forward by Thatcher. I thought somewhere in the past you claimed to be a socialist! It seems to me the more you reveal your ideas the closer you come to fascism.
Arthur Bough
I Thought You Had read marx!!!
I thought you had read Marx!!! Society cannot be understood simply as an amalgamation of individuals, because that would imply that an individual can be understood on their own, separate from society, which they cannot because all individual are a part of a society. It is the individual that can be udnerstood by first understanding the society of which they are part. A human being is not an amalgamation of different body parts it can only be understood for what it is, a human being, and a human liver from that human being can only be udnerstood if you udnerstand a human being, and the function of that liver within that human being.
This is very basic stuff that anyone who has read marx should know. But more than that society even on the basis you set out cannot be udnerstood as simply an aglomeration of individuals because even a casual observation of any society shows that it is made up of different social groups, classes, castes, interest groups of varying kinds, women, men and so on. Just as any piece of matter is not made up of an agglomeration of atoms, but of molecules.
Society never was constructed as an amalgamation of individuals as Rousseaua beleived - though he had the excuse that at the time he was writing he didn't have the benefit of the knowledge of modern anthropology - because human beings came into existence not as individuals but as human societies. I suggest you read more Marx, and think about it more carefully before you follow Maggie Thatcher and other right-wing ideologues so blindly.
Arthur Bough
Back to Front
You have this completely back to front. You say an individual can exist without society. Clearly, they cannot because without society, even a society of just two people, there could be no procreation so no individual in the first place. Nomadic loners, hermits etc. do not suddenly spring into existence from nowhere like some exotic particle they are the product of human society.
Do you look at a cake that has been cut into several slices an conclude that the cake is the agglomeration of all these slices? No of course you don't because the cake like human society comes into existence as a whole not as individual pieces. The individual pieces can only exist because the whole came into existence in the first place.
Your extension of my reference to atoms and molecules is equally wrong. I used the example of atoms to emonstrate that even on the individualist basis you were arguing, to which the atom parallel applies and not my original example, matter is made up not of these individual atoms, but of molecules. But if we apply the analogy correctly your argument still fails. A molecule that is part of a piece of wood in a chair, is only such a molecule as long as it is part of a chair. Once removed from the chair, or used in some other way, it ceases to be what it was whilst remaining a molecule.
Now it is true that say a hydrogen atom remains an hydrogen atom whether it is part of a water molecule, which in turn is part of a lake, or merely a glass of water. But that is because hyrdogen atoms come into existence fully formed in their own right - though it could be argue that all atoms only come into existence because of the existence of the material Universe, that they are created from more exotic particles in stars, and novae etc. But as I have shown above that does not apply to human beings. They do not simply pop into existence separate from society. Society itself is the basic unit, not the individual.
As for your return to gobbledegook masquerading as philosophy in your last paragraph I will resist the temptation to jump back on that merry go round, thank you, and simply refer you back to my refutation of your argument in that respect above.
Arthur Bough
Sean
Let us begin with the two choice words, good and honest. Are the millions of good honest working class religious nuts being honest when they tell thier children trumped up fairy tails of gods and demons? Honesty and religion are like chalk and cheese, even the athiest contingent of the working class are being dishonest if not only to themselves. Now, are these working class people good? Is avoiding the truth good? Is decieving yourself and others good? How do you define good?
How do I define good?
In the actual context in this specific discussion what I mean by good is 'not bad' - not particularly remarkable just nice, honest, day to day people.
People who are exploited and repressed by a socio-economic system that reduces them to the mere value of their labour.
Of course they are good, what else could they be?
What do you really mean?
Well we've already established that these people are not honest, but let me understand this correctly, good in your opinion is the lesser of two evils. A rapist is good because he is being compared to a murderer say? And is all good relative to person, situation and in context or is there a "universal good", rather than just a list of examples of actions interpreted by you as being good?
Honesty
Martina
I try to make head or tail of your contributions to these discussions, and usually fail. It might be nice to know something about you, where you're coming from - intellectually and politically - since it might help - me, anyway - understand you better.
On this issue. I can't believe you go through your life with this kind of absolutist notion of things. Of course religious people can be honest. At the very least they can be honest about things other than religion. Or how do you have any dealings with most people around you - most of whom, probably, are religious to some degree - if you think they are in general inveterate liars? In any case it does not follow from the falsehood of someone's ideas that they hold them dishonestly.
Incidentally, if that is not true, surely all discussion of any kind is impossible. If you think that because my beliefs are false that I am dishonest to hold them, how can you communicate with me at all? (And it works both ways, of course. Presumably you are prepared to concede that you might be wrong. But are you therefore dishonest?)
Any person who lives in the real world knows what Sean means by good and honest.
Socratic Skeptic possibly
Predominatly I would say that I am a skeptic with concerns to the "external world". Since almost everything I know could be false I choose to suspend all unproven beliefs pending validation of the event. Politacaly I fight for a society more accomodating of the truth, you call it communism, I call it fact. Absolutist? Where truth is concerned, absolutly. When people are willing to argue for their false beliefs, proclaim life to be anything more than pointless, or themselves anything more than what they are, to act outside of reason and truth, and in doing so put back understanding of my own existance, then I have no choice but to defend the truth, because in a pointless world to find meaning is all that really matters. This is the only good, every other belief held true in the eyes of the believer is a nessacery evil since it goes against reality and thier understanding thereof. And as "no man is an island", their beliefs and the actions caused by them affect me and slow my understanding. Where I can debate with others about thier own perception on what is real, I do, and it is true that many a friend has turned foe, not because I believe they are inveterate liars but because they are. Where the majority choose to create something from nothing in an atempt to decieve themselves, I choose to explore the so called nothingness, by any and all ways and means. This is the only thing worth doing, as a great man once said,
"the life which is unexamined is not worth living"
If they lie, they're liars, and that is neither honest nor good no matter what anybody says
End Game
If you choose to suspend all unproven beliefs pending validation by event then clearly you cannot believe in anything, because no such validation can ever occur. Any such validation is only a temporary validation pending some other event disproving it. You must remain in a permanent state therefore of disbelief. That is not skepticism it is nihilism.
As you can given the philosophy never believe in anything, then anything you tell us you do believe in must be a lie, which then makes you a liar, and gives us every reason to disregard anything you say.
Arthur Bough
Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu
Not atall, validity in an event and the subsequent validation of a suppossed contradictory event only proves that I should withold belief on that which I have not experianced.
"Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu".
If two (or more) identical circumstances seem to cancel each other out in my pursuit of truth, then there is something beyond my understanding which I have not percieved (in one or more of the events) and therefore they were not identical to begin with, merely an illusion of equality, but to believe that they were would be wrong. The events can not change, only my understanding of thier cause(s). This is not nihilism as I do not reject everything, only that which I have not seen for myself. I am skeptical of what other people claim to have experianced. How do we KNOW anything? Bearing in mind knowing is different from assuming.
Check, Mr Bough
So Seeing Is Believing
If seeing is believing then those that have religious visions have proof of God don't they. After all they have seen them.
The problem you put yourself in here is that discussed by Descartes - our senses often deceive us. That being so they cannot be relied upon, and so you can never guarantee that what you see or experience is true. Whether or not there is some absolute truth in events separate from that we experience is then meaningless from your standpoint because that separate truth is always unknowable.
Once again you return to nihilism.
Arthur Bough
Define nihilism
One of us is confused. Nihilism to me is the rejection of all things, I have not said that I reject everything, but what I do know is very little. I believe that I exist for starters, which blows your nihilistic theory out the water. And again, I do not use Descartes as a base for philosophical enquiry, only as an example of how the human condition is relative to an individuals own existance, and how skeptisism still holds water after 2500 years of effective philosophy. If any philosopher has influenced my views it is that of Socrates. His approach to life is more reflective of my experiances, and personally speaking (as if there was another way) philosophy hasn't really progressed any further since. Nihilist, no, skeptic, maybe not in our argument, agnostic, quite possibly. And hallucenations and visions are all the more reason to suspend judgement, don't you think?
dead end thinking
I used to think like this when I was backpacking in South Asia, its futile and ultimately depressing. Assuming everything is an illusion is just a road to nowhere, worse it is a route to, spirituality and relgion because if we cannot believe in the material world then what is left but hogus pokus, superstition and and reactionary quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo.
Furthermore it offers no solutions to the REAL problems faced by REAL people in the REAL world. So even if reality is an illusion its real to me right now and that which is real to me right now is far more important than abstract definitions of truth and the nature of physical reality.
Not a Question of Definition
The problem is not one of definition. The problem is that you believe you are a skeptic, but in terms of the argument you have put forward you have placed yourself in the position of the nihilist.
Why is that? Because you have adopted first of all an extreme skeptic position in which on the one hand you reject acceptance of any truth other than an absolute truth. That assumes such absolute truths exist. But then having placed yourslef in that position you claim that your test for such an absolute truth is your own experience, that you will accept something as true if your senses tell you it is true.
But as you accept the argument that hallucimnations, illusions etc. are all the more reason to suspend judgement you must then accept that your own senses are in fact no basis on which to determine whether what you experience are in fact these absolute truths or not. So you are then left in a position of saying that you will only accept absolute truths as being real truths, and at the same time the means of determining these absolute truths (your senses) cannot be relied upon, and consequently any judgement of whether this experience represents experience of a real truth or not has to be suspeneded. Consequently, you end up in a situation where logically you can believe in nothing, and that is nihilism.
Arthur Bough
Absolute
There are no absoloute truths? I beg to differ. If we are in agreement that everything external of the mind could be false, and even a priori knowledge could be the fabrication of a decieving entity/god, then it follows that whether I am having an hallucenation, or I am being decieved or I am not, I am (if only as a thinking thing). Even to doubt this is to prove it true. But what sense sensed my existance? Like you say, my senses are in FACT no basis on which to determine whether there are absolute truths. A believer in anything is not a nihilist, and already there are two absolute truths for which I cannot help but believe. Whereas what I believe encourages others to find the truth for themselves, your methods will inevitably lead to dogmatic beliefs and only serve to cover the truth.
"Any such validation is only temporary validation pending some other event disproving it", A. Bough.
Is Santa Claus Real? As a kid I believed he was, yet the event was not seeing Santa Claus but recieving the presents which forged the idea. Whereas I was wrong to believe in the cause of the presents I could not be wrong in actually recieving them (without the rest of "reality" falling apart). Belief other than the event is just that, unproven belief, taking somebody elses' word in replace of personal experiance.
Same debate
We've had this debate before it seems pointless. If the only thing you can be certain of is your own existence - and not even the nature of that existence - then that seems like nihilism to me. You have to exist in order to be a nihilist so not even a nihilist would deny their own existence in some form.
Even that "absolute truth" as I've demonstrated before is not absolute. Even if I accept that I exist - and for the purpose of all practical activity I do - as a corporeal entity then that entity is continually changing. I am not the same entity that I was when I began this sentence, and for any period of time no matter how small that will be true. Only for a period of time that has no beginning or end could that not be the case, but as everything exists in time it must always be the case that I am constantly changing so what I am A is never equal to A.
Cogito Ergo Sum does not require a sense to sense existence it merely requires a consciousness to think.
You would have to explain why it is that my methods cover the truth and lead to dogmatic beleiefs when in fact it is you that is the one with the dogmatic beleifs about people who are religious necessarily being liars.
But you have no more reason to trust your senses that you did in fact recieve presents than to trust them in any other respect. Does santa Claus exist? In all probability not, but I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility that in some reality somewhere in an infinite Universe something approaching it couldn't exist. That is the problem with trying to prove a negative. People used to believe that Black Swans didn't exist.
The fact is that there is often no practical alterntive but to take someone else's word rather than rely on personal experience. There should always be an element of caution in doing so, that element varying in accordance with the consequences for us of taking someone else's word, and our confidence in that other person. If my wife tells me someone is about to attack me from behind I am gooing to act straight away on her word not wait and check for myself whether she is telling the truth.
Arthur Bough
A continuation
If we are using the definition of nihilism as described by Jacobi or Nietzsche then even the truth of the cogito is in dispute. Since we are using the term "extreme skeptisism" along with nihilism then I take it to mean the belief in nothing, up to and including existence. Nihilism is in reality meaningless and ultimately parodixical.
If it is held true by the nihilist that truth does not exist, then it cannot be a truth that truth does not exist.
This proves that all nihilists are really skeptics in denial. Or to put it another way, wrong.
Does A equal A? I don't know, does the 1 you knew when you were ten still function as the same 1 you know now? Or has it gained something with experiance and age, maybe 1+1 to you now equals 3. We have had this debate, and as I recall you stopped short of this contradiction. Where you assert that everything in time changes you could not account for the truth that ideas do not. Where you stop believing in saint Nick you are still aware of the idea and your reasons for believing in the first place. Your idea of him has not changed, only where you place your belief. Does this mean ideas exist outside of time? More likely that your assertions are wrong. "I" is the idea of existence, and cannot change without it losing meaning to the thinker. If I did not know what the concept of existence was then I could not question it. "I" is an idea which cannot change, it is always true or it doesn't matter, an absolute.
"It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off." Nietzsche
Where your methods increase dogmatic beliefs are spelled out by yourself
on your last paragraph,
"The fact is that there is often no practical alternative but to take someone else's word..."
What better sentence to define dogma than the fallacy of what your methods accept as nessacery. How my aproach is superior, firstly because it accepts that nothing has real meaning or purpose and the only truth is that which we already know. Secondly, although there is no substitution for relative personal experience, the results of such experiences are ultimately meaningless. Finaly, it gives people choice beyond nihilism and materialism. If everything is "real" in that it actually exists, if this universe is constructed from the laws of physics, cause and effect, then everything is a product of the action which preceeded it, ultimatly regressing, as you seem to agree, to a begining. Everthing which I think or do has been predetermined, even now I have no choice but to think about choice. By presuppossing a metaphysical world leads to a philosophy or way of thinking which ultimatly ends in a situation worse than nihilism, that of predeterminism. What little control humanity has achieved is all at once lost to fate. For this reason I favour my thinking, "we have to believe in free will, we have no choice". Only when nothing matters will humanity stop suffering.
Paradox
But you remain caught in that paradox. You say that the only knowledge is that which we already know, but in fact when pressed you have to acept that on the basis of your philosophy we know nothing. You can to know the existence of "I", but what is the use of the knowledge of this "I" if you do not know, and cannot prove the nature of this "I", and on the basis of your skepticism you cannot prove the nature of this "I". I assert that everything changes over time, and therefore everything is in the process of becoming including this "I".
You claim that ideas do not change. I disagree. Ideas are a reflection of the material world, and the material world is in constant flux. Ideas themeslves I would argue as a materialist exist in people heads, and are in the end merely manifestations of complex chemical processes occurring in the brain, which is itself constantly changing. Ideas not just as reflections of an ever changing reality, but also as constantly changing chemical reactions in the brain must, therefore, themselves constantly be changing, and therefore cannot be absolute.
You can if you like in your extreme skepticism deny the existence of this material world, but where does that then get you? You then have to posit the existence of the "I" as something existing outside this material world. You then have the problem of defining what it is, and of demonstrating that it exists in that form, and then demonstrating that it itself is not constantly changing. You cannot do that anymore than you can prove the existence of God. In fact, it is odd that this discussion began as a discussion of secularism vs religion, and your antipathy to religion within that context because in the end your posisition has now resolved itself into a deeply religious one having found yourself rejecting materialism to defend your skepticism.
You now find yourself in the position of having reject