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 Participants and Observers

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Ephemeron

Ephemeron

Gender : Male Posts : 37
Join date : 2012-09-22
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PostSubject: Participants and Observers Participants and Observers EmptyFri Oct 03, 2014 11:07 am

When we think of truth, as a word, we should understand what we are talking about.  And this I believe in its most original sense, is the permanence of experience.   Language, to the degree that it increases the clarity of experience, is philo-sophic.  To the degree which it obscures or confuses it, is anti-sophic.  

We have learned through Herder that Language is particular to a people and a culture and so too is any truth particular having meaning to some but irrelevancy to others.  Thus philosophy is a return to the origin of that truth which represents itself in a particular language and speaks to the very root from whence the words derived their being.  This is the most clear and exact path which leads one to the origin of the word itself when it came into being when man was most active and least saddled with prejudice.  

The first stage we should pass through in our search for a truth is optimism in so far as the idea acts positively toward the objects improvement.  This early course should take the student of philosophy through all of the optimistic streams of thought brought into prominence by the Enlightenment thinkers.  They should take these streams as far as they go and adopt them to themselves insomuch as their experience allows, taking them into the world and testing them against their every activity and thought.  

They should apply their system of optimism as fully as they can to all questions which confront them and only then when they have exhausted this well and have exposed themselves to some of the counter claims against optimism, will they begin to turn themselves round to the pessimistic streams of thought.  These like a field of newly sown wheat, will spring up naturally of their own accord within the mind.  We needn’t go to the length of installing them because our end is not to create the pessimist but the philosopher.  Their own experience will have already sown the seeds and the new shoots will push their way out of the soils of concealment.  They shall then go back into conflict, and take these truths which act in opposition to the improvement of the objcet as far as they can until they have exposed themselves to subtler and subtler counter claims.  These too, they shall already know the strengths and weaknesses of from their past experiences.  

It is then that we will have succeeded in creating a philosopher but more we will have created a basis for human activity since the end of philosophy has never been to know but to act because we know.    

At this stage our philosopher will have obtained a very important insight, and this is the Hegelian synthesis between the two streams of thought that will reveal itself in the fruit of their labors.  Through this an activity that hitherto would have been beyond reach is made accessible.  Their stream of active thought can now flow freely from the idea to the act and back with minimum resistance.  The powers of discernment will become incredibly concise and the chance of error and bad judgment will be lessened.    For they will be neither too forward thinking as regards the future nor too backward thinking in relation to the past but will always remain rooted in the present, the “here and now”.   They will see that the potential for man to become worse and to become better is not fixed but is a possibility with endless combinations and uncertainties attached to it.  

They will have gained a realistic viewpoint on human progress and abandoned the idealism of the mind which bends time into a linear progression.  At their command will be the control over thought as a means to activity and activity for them will become a means to greater activity.  They become men of the moment, not as the brute but as masters of the mind and intellect.  By shackling the mind to the ends of the body they will become participants rather than observers.
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