I’m reading this book about the history of Western philosophy and I’m in love.
I’m 3/4 of the way through it, but I’m honestly unsure if I exist. I’d always assumed that I existed.
Nothing really seems real, and I’m unsure of how I feel, that’s perfectly ok.
Anyway, I’ve been “batshit crazy” (jim stone’s term) before, and it’s the exact feeling I have now. I figured this was a good place to ask - what’s the difference between the two feelings?
I don’t think there really is a difference. It’s all in the people you tell. (Doesn’t that sound mental?)
Cran,
Is the question the difference between being in love and being batshit crazy? If yes, then…the difference is that being in love doesn’t last as long and cannot be treated with drugs.
Mike
In Meditations II, he (at least, to himself) proves that he exists.
[ Note that there’s a great deal of talk in his meditations about the existence or lack of existence of God – keep in mind that Descartes was writing at the height of the witch craze, when publishing anything heretical was Not A Good Idea. To the point where he had to move to Holland to do his writing, as he would have probably been executed in France for his publications. So while there is a great deal of energy spent asserting the existence of God, it’s not clear to me how much of that was honest and how much of it was CYA writing. ]
Cran, the sceptical arguments you’re reading are meant to be taken seriously, but not that seriously. It’s a bit hard to explain if it doesn’t just come naturally to you but I’ll try.
It’s not quite that you are supposed to take them in a detached rather than an engaged way. It’s more like acting. While you’re doing it, throw yourself into it wholeheartedly, but not so wholeheartedly that you carry on acting if the theatre is on fire. When the curtain falls, go back to whatever you were doing as though nothing had happened.
Almost nobody thinks that, if you don’t have conclusive proof of your own existence, then it’s irrational to believe that you exist. Most people simply use those arguments to soften you up for what they regard as a new and better explanation of how we know the ordinary things we take ourselves to know.
I completely understand that, Wombat. I can and am still carrying on normal life, lol.
But I’m left sort of…hmm…feeling rather insane. I’m pondering everything really deeply and I was just wondering how this feeling differs from psychosis, because in my experience the feelings similar, if not the same. For me at least. I wonder how they differ.
Almost nobody thinks that, if you don’t have conclusive proof of your own existence, then it’s irrational to believe that you exist.
The fact that a question is cannot prove anything. However if you said ‘I do not exist’ it is self contradictory since nothing can both assert and not be.
De Cartes final, and to him most cogent, arguement states ’ if there is an evil demon which would decieve me … that I am not’ etc. He reiterates the proof many differnet ways and it is all the same in the end. You cannot truely assert that you are not, an evil demon cannot decieve you into not being for there MUST BE something that is decieved… etc.
De Cartes was educated by Catholic Jesuit Priests and is the inventor of Co-ordinate Geometry - Sin Cos Tan and all that good stuff.
Also, you should realize that in philosophy there are a number of recognized fallacies (erroneos arguments if you will), that no one can refute yet no one believes in. The reason is that these fallacies are water-tight: you cannot prove them wrong. But that doesn’t mean they are right, or should be taken seriously.
One of these fallacies is solipcism, which states that everything is just a figment of your mind. Nothing exists. You can’t disprove solipcism because even its refutation is imaginary. (The reason this particular bit of madness is called solipcism is that the result of it is that each person is completely isolated, interacting with nothing but his/her own imagination, from solo=alone).
Another fallacy is assuming that one doesn’t exist. It is also cute, because difficult or impossible to refute. But it’s a bit of bummer if you think about it, because if I don’t exist who was that getting so amazingly drunk at the Philological Society’s annual reception last Thursday that I spilled my drink down Prof. Sibylle Cotwold’s decolte and called old Prof. Werckenheimer’s new book “a failed attempt at onanism” in his presence? Certain moments I just wouldn’t want to miss, therefore it can’t be true.
Err… not exactly. René Descartes was educated in a Jesuit College, is all. After which he joined the army (as a mercenary…), and the rest of his life remained (thanks god!) secular.
Beside maths, his scientific research also led him to basically invent the branch of Physics which is Optics. After him, not much evolved in this field before the 20th century, with relativity, then the quantic approach of optics…
Hence, his physics theories remained valid longer than Newton’s (born approximately when Descartes died).
Thanks, Von Bloomingblume
Couldn’t recall the word–solstice, solitarism, one-to-one-anism?–when I replied to Cran we could all but him be illusions…
Not crazy, just mistaken. We know most things only on the balance of probabilities. When we get really lucky, we might know something beyond reasonable doubt. By these standards, you’re just setting your sights a bit high.
It is very valuable to understand why nearly all our knowledge falls short of conclusive proof. Once you can see why that must be so, you can set appropriate standards and relax in the knowledge that you are doing as well as anybody can do. If you insist on setting inappropriately high standards after you have worked this out, that’s the time to ask yourself why. And if you still want to set standards too high after you have questioned yourself in this way, then you might want to question your sanity. That’s a long way off though.
First, ‘Parfit and the Buddha: Why There Are No People,’
in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1988.
Second ‘Why There Still Are No People,’ forthcoming
in the same journal.
Hume in The Treatise argues for what I take to
be a similar conclusion. The Buddha taught that
there is no subject of experiences, ‘Acts exist
but the person who acts does not, thoughts without a thinker.’
Lots of mental phenomena go by, but nobody has them.
I think that’s the truth. The rest–the sense of
being somebody-- in an artifact
of clinging.
I think you’re right on. Maybe you should be
a philosopher. That’s basically full-blown batshit
crazy but still holding down a steady job.
If you feel you don’t exist, you’re not crazy
as long as you honor common sense,
and you are kind–that’s enlightenment. The Buddha spent
most of his life bringing to people he knew didn’t
exist the liberating news that they never were.
He did that from compassion for the people he
knew didn’t exist. The deepest wisdom,
and where philosophy becomes religion, is when
the realization of selflessness (anatta, in Pali)
motivates kindness. Best
We speak as though there are persons; they
have a conventional existence, a bit like
baseball teams and The Big Dipper.
‘Chariot’ doesn’t name this or that part,
the wheels, the yoke, nor does it name
the sum of parts, for that ceases
to exist when a part is changed but
the chariot does not, we say.
There is nothing in reality denoted
by ‘chariot’ ; it’s a useful fiction.
Same with "jim,’ ‘Bloomfield,’
and ‘Cranberry.’
Steven Collins "What are Buddhists Doing When they deny the Self in Religion and Practical Reason edited by Frank E. reynolds and
David Tracy, State University of NYPress, 1994 59-84.
p. 64.
Central to Buddhist soteriology is the doctrine of not-self (Pali anatta, Sanskrit anatman; the opposed doctrine of atman was central to Brahmanical thought). Put very briefly, this is the doctrine that human beings have no soul, no self, no unchanging essence. What appear to be stable and unitary persons are in fact collections of impersonal and impermanent events, arising and disappearing in a beginningless process of conditioning, a process which includes both physical causation and the spriritual causation of karma, action and its results. Connectedness across a series of lives occurs through the continuity of consciousness, seen as a constantly changing series of momentary events, in which both memory and temporary coherence of personality can be found, but no enduring self.
