[Re:] Why should things Exist?

[Guest guest]

Namaste Chittaranjanji!

 

Chiming in here with your beautiful free writing,

 

C:

That is the tradition of Eleatic and Platonic philosophy, as it truly

was, before its meanings were reified by the restricted

interpretations given to it by modern acadamia. It is ironical, in

this context, that the establishment of Plato was called

the "Academy".

 

===I felt this irony! Much of what you say below conveys the sterility I felt

about the current practice of academic philosophy when I got to grad school.

Before I arrived, I had always approached philosophy (as an undergrad and on my

own) as something to help me pierce the mysteries of existence. This sounds

corny for something a twentisomething kid does. But anyone who looks at the

Socratic dialogues can see the life-and-death relevance it had to the

participants. They were approaching it this way, and were my guides in my young

years! In fact, I changed my major from psychology for just this reason! But

when I got to grad school, I found this bloodless analytic approach. We were

analyzing sentences for truth values, not trying to burrow into Truth.

 

C:

The search for clarity in analytical philosophy, for example, is

undertaken on the foundations of a meaning of "existence" that

is not uncovered, but which is given to analytical philosophy

by Frege and Russel while defining its syntactical structures.

....

The meaning of "existence" as "instantiation of objects" was not

the result of a philosophical investigation, but the result of a

forcing of dogma on to the framework of modern symbolic logic.

 

===It becomes as dry as differential calculus. The relevance to our yearnings

isn't there. It departs as soon as we start speaking of propositions and

language games.

 

 

C:

It is because of this restriction that modern philosophy

fails to quell the deep noetic unrest within us; it fails to respond

to the mystical that lies in the core of our being.

 

===Actually, my Berkeley teacher was an exception to this. You could see the

the gleam in his eye for the soteriological value of Berkeley's antimaterialism.

He was overjoyed when he finally passed this on to me!

 

 

C:

What is the chronic problem that characterises modern philosophy?

 

===The chronic problem is that it's done by professionals! It needs passionate

amateurs, for whom the questions matter!

 

 

C:

We question the world, but we never question this thing

called "reason" that we have defined and encapsulated in a formalism.

 

===Actually, postmodern philosophy does question reason. Derrida, etc.

 

 

C:

That is why Advaita places reason below perception, and perception

below Shruti, in the hierarchy of pramanas. That is why Socrates

was the wisest man in all of Greece, because he refused to say

what the truth is, and was content to remain a midwife for any

man that was pregnant already with knowledge. (It might be

appropriate to mention here that the "Way of Truth" was given

to Parmenides by the Goddess as a revelation.)

 

===It might be appropriate to mention also that he was a mystic and a wise man.

His teacher was a female deity, a wise mystic, named Diotima of Mantinea (ca.

400s B.C.). Diotima taught Socrates the question-and-answer method that later

bore his name. Socrates reveals his mysterious mystical teacher and his

mystical soul in the dialogue Symposium, where the characters expound on love.

Through a series of remarkable openings and insights, Socrates is led to seeing

love not as eros, but as a means to immortality. See Symposium 10, 207a

(http://plato.evansville.edu/texts/jowett/symposium10.htm).

 

The parallels to bhakti yoga are striking!

 

Pranams,

 

--Greg

[Guest guest]

Namaste Gregoryji,

 

Thank you for your kind words. Just some minor points....

 

advaitin, Gregory Goode <goode@D...> wrote:

> Namaste Chittaranjanji!

> C:

> We question the world, but we never question this thing

> called "reason" that we have defined and encapsulated in

> a formalism.

>

> ===Actually, postmodern philosophy does question reason. Derrida,

etc.

 

I hadn't thought of that! But of course, deconstruction wasn't the

sort of questioning I meant. Postmodern questioning and

deconstruction is too much an act of the intellect. The kind of

apperceptive questioning that I meant was one that takes the

intellect to quiescence whereby the "vrittis" become free of the

strivings of the intellect. It is the return of the intellect to that

pristine state in which the word is "phone" and the meaning

is "gramme" writ as the world.

 

 

===It might be appropriate to mention also that he was a mystic and a

wise man. His teacher was a female deity, a wise mystic, named

Diotima of Mantinea (ca. 400s B.C.). Diotima taught Socrates the

question-and-answer method that later bore his name. Socrates

reveals his mysterious mystical teacher and his mystical soul in the

dialogue Symposium, where the characters expound on love. Through a

series of remarkable openings and insights, Socrates is led to seeing

love not as eros, but as a means to immortality. See Symposium 10,

207a (http://plato.evansville.edu/texts/jowett/symposium10.htm).

>

 

This is revealing! I hadn't exactly seen Diotima in this light. It

explains the many statements in Plato's dialogues about the

initiations into the mysteries.

>From the description that Alcibiades provides in the Symposium, it

would appear that Socrates was also a sage and a yogi.

 

With regards,

Chittaranjan

[Guest guest]

At 12:59 PM 2/26/2004 +0000, Chittaranjan Naik wrote:

>>From the description that Alcibiades provides in the Symposium, it

>would appear that Socrates was also a sage and a yogi.

 

I agree!

 

--Greg