4 Passages from today's 15 Minute A History of Philosophy reading:
"There is no universal outside the mind."
" . . . similarity [is] the foundation of the specific concept . . . . "
"The individual thing can make an impression on the senses in such a way that there is sense-knowledge or intuition of the individual things individual, but the material thing cannot make an impression of this sort on the immaterial intellect; its form is known abstractly by the intellect, which cannot directly and immediately attain the individual thing as individual."
" . . . it is clear that a universal thing does not exist, except in individual things and through individual things . . . . "
I am pretty sure that human knowledge & human progress absolutely depend upon the ability to form concepts. To abstract. To form universals.
I'm going to leave that as axiomatic unless there is an objection. Okay? Okay.
Combining that thought with Today's 4 AHoP quotes suggests that our ability to form concepts (etc.) is dependent upon our ability to create metaphors.
To be extreme about it, then, the eternal is a product of mind + sense experience / metaphor. Or maybe that should be X metaphor. I could go either way on that bit. But the important bit is that just living, just experiencing that which is to be experienced, is, in the end, futile and empty, signifying nothing. Conversely, to be removed from experience is just as empty, because it's the interaction of the two which creates the universal.
And to be extremer . . . . Well, I've been thinking about God quite a bit lately. And one of the ideas I've been constructing (and which I think I detailed previously, so I will go for the short version here) is that we (human beings) are in the process of collectively creating God by way of living every possible variation of human life. And of course that might be as self-indulgently bullshitty as Dioretix. 1 But hey, it's my soap, my water . . . . And I think that the Collectively Creating God idea fits in quite nicely with Today's 4 AHoP quotes. And it pretty much defines why we are here, why we need each other, and why art is a necessity.
Because it's all about metaphor.
And all art is metaphor.
And I think it also suggests that all art . . . high, low, middle middle . . . is useful. Because you want input from a variety of sources. The more the merrier. Everything that we experience goes into the mix.
That's pretty fuckin' optimistic, ennit?
1 Science of matter over mind. Repo Man, anyone?
To be extreme about it, then, the eternal is a product of mind + sense experience / metaphor. Or maybe that should be X metaphor. I could go either way on that bit. But the important bit is that just living, just experiencing that which is to be experienced, is, in the end, futile and empty, signifying nothing. Conversely, to be removed from experience is just as empty, because it's the interaction of the two which creates the universal.
And to be extremer . . . . Well, I've been thinking about God quite a bit lately. And one of the ideas I've been constructing (and which I think I detailed previously, so I will go for the short version here) is that we (human beings) are in the process of collectively creating God by way of living every possible variation of human life. And of course that might be as self-indulgently bullshitty as Dioretix. 1 But hey, it's my soap, my water . . . . And I think that the Collectively Creating God idea fits in quite nicely with Today's 4 AHoP quotes. And it pretty much defines why we are here, why we need each other, and why art is a necessity.
Because it's all about metaphor.
And all art is metaphor.
And I think it also suggests that all art . . . high, low, middle middle . . . is useful. Because you want input from a variety of sources. The more the merrier. Everything that we experience goes into the mix.
That's pretty fuckin' optimistic, ennit?
1 Science of matter over mind. Repo Man, anyone?
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