The Absolute is absolute thought, existence is thought, the realities of existence are forms of thought, and we are only a form of thought. Thought can comprehend thought. When the philosophers and the scientists will realize this, they will no longer raise any objection against anthropomorphism. The truth that thought is the substance of all realities was perceived by profound thinkers long ago, but it took science a long time to perceive this truth.--Harry Waton / A true monistic philosophy, v. 1, p54
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What useful stuff has philosophy accomplished for man-kind?
- Thread starter rousseau
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So what? Why?
WAB
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Thanks for the link. I'm a Spinozist (with a few scant disagreements) and I didn't even realize there was a Spinoza Institute, though I should have figured there would be something like it. That looks like a great read. Here's a bit from the beginning, which is completely congruous with this thread:
[emphasis mine]
barbos
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That makes scientist consulting a philosopher about particular experiment ridiculous.
So that!
Speakpigeon
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This is one rather pathetic pronouncement!
Saying "The truth that thought is the substance of all realities" doesn't make it true that thought is the substance of all realities.
This also seems to acknowledge that, as I think is usually believed, it is not tautological nor in any way self-evident that reality only includes thoughts. So now the question is how thought would know that thought is indeed the substance of all realities. This question doesn't seem to have any answer. Me, understood as thought, certainly doesn't know that the whole of reality is thought. Not only that, but I have absolutely no idea how anyone could ever know that it is, or for that matter, isn't.
The appeal to the authority of some profound thinkers is also pathetic. Other equally profound thinkers have thought otherwise.
Finally, even more pathetic because it totally discredits the whole book if the quote is accurate, is the claim that science perceived this truth! This is so completely ridiculous it suggests the author is not only not a profound thinker but a complete moron. I can only hope the quote is not accurate.
EB
Speakpigeon
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This is also particularly pathetic. What does it possibly mean? It would have made sense here to talk of a chief claim, or a contention etc. But how this "affirmation" here could possibly be an assumption?!
Also, to insist that this rather trivial "affirmation" is the CHIEF assumption of this Monistic Philosophy is to suggest that there is not much else to it and therefore that it has little philosophical content if any at all. So, why is it called a "philosophy" at all?
Unfortunately, being a profound thinker does not guaranty that you are a proficient writer, as indeed demonstrated by many philosophers and scientists, but this is way below normal expectations, suggesting that nobody even bothered to read the draft before publication. Not good, that.
This provided again that the quote is accurate.
EB
WAB
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I don't think posting a few quotes from an author's book is necessarily an appeal to authority. It's progressively harder for each generation to generate new thoughts and new sentences pertaining to popular topics, particularly in this age where so many people have fast fingertip access to virtual libraries all over the world. Most of the time, if you really try, you can find at least one dead person who said exactly what you were thinking at time x, and said it in a really fancy way. There's nothing new under the sun.
About this author. I was excited at first but when I looked him up, it gave me reason to pause and proceed with caution. It seems Waton was convinced that Judaism — not through violence, but with gentle persuasion and example — would take over the world. Whenever I read words like that I think of that twisted rabbit in Hoodwinked and his evil lair.
Watch out for Keith!
Speakpigeon
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Of course not but I wasn't accusing No Robots here I was talking about this guy Harry Waton who (according to No Robots's quote) didn't quote anybody himself but justified his point by claiming that "profound thinkers" had already made the same point as him.
It may be perfectly acceptable to trace your ideas back to first thinkers but it depends how you do it. If it's merely to point out that Descartes or Plato agreed with you then it's an appeal to authority. It's only OK if it's to discuss their specific arguments supporting your point. I agree with the Cogito as I understand it so I see no reason to pretend the Cogito doesn't exist and would be wrong if I did. Descartes' discussion of it is also perfectly good to me so I would certainly quote it. Now, since even Kant seems to have misunderstood Descartes here, and with him the whole of subjective philosophy, then I would certainly try to show how Descartes was right, and Kant wrong.
As too what's left to discuss nowadays I think we are very far from being bereft of topics. Rather, people today seem to come up with the same basic ideas as people yesterday, and no wonder. Progress can only come from reading past philosophers or, perhaps better, contemporary discussions of them. Now, if you happen to agree with what past philosophers have said, then, yes, there is nothing left for you to say. But most philosophers have only produced a few bright ideas while also supporting the most outrageous views, like indeed Descartes himself with his "proof" of God or his Dualistic view of reality.
EB
Not at all. We all have our specialities.
Speaking about "scientists" and "philosophers" as single well defined types, as you and DBT does, THAT is ridiculous.
WAB
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DBT
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I'm not claiming an inseparable divide in terms of logic and reason. Just that philosophy is not the same as science. A degree in philosophy entails a different cour to that of a degree in physics, biology, etc. If you have a degree in physics, you are not considered to be a philosopher, but a physicist. A philosopher may know very little about QM, for instance, because QM is not a part of his field of expertise, and a physicist may know very little about Hume, etc.
barbos
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Yes at all.
Not only that such thing is ridiculous but it never happens - scientist never consult philosophers about their experiments.
The metaphysical foundations necessary to support an adequate scientific method, the vision of a unified science entailed by such foundationist propositions, the criticism, and, partly, correction of Cartesian physical theory, original use of the mathematical tradition, anticipations of twentieth century doctrines of space and time, the application of a complex investigative method in the emerging field of scientific hermeneutics: all these features are to be discovered when we look at Spinoza in the context of the history of the sciences, from his own time to ours.--Introduction to Spinoza and the Sciences / edited by Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, pp. xviii-xix.
Our science is not yet developed enough to correctly assess Spinoza's significance for scientific thinking; our science is still stuck in children's shoes…. The more science grows, the higher will rise the image of Spinoza.--Constantin Brunner / Spinoza contra Kant
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Our science is not yet developed enough to correctly assess Spinoza's significance for scientific thinking; our science is still stuck in children's shoes…. The more science grows, the higher will rise the image of Spinoza.--Constantin Brunner / Spinoza contra Kant
barbos
Contributor
I think you are a robot
[T]rue science proceeds from cause to effect; though the ancients, so far as I know, never formed the conception put forward here that the soul acts according to fixed laws; and is, as it were, a spiritual automaton.--Spinoza
I would no more try to reinvent a philosophical system than I would try to reinvent a transportation system. Indeed, far less. As Spinoza puts it:
But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, with small expenditure of labour, the vast number of complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.--On the Improvement of the Understanding
It's so much easier and more effective to use the intellectual instruments constructed by the great thinkers of the past than to try to start from scratch on one's own.
There was a tremendous movement in the early twentieth century to identify Spinoza with Judaism, and Judaism with the summit of thought. Here is a representative quotation:
The basic idea of the system of Spinoza, namely, that God is the only substance, the ground and origin of all being, is the fundamental expression of the Jewish genius, which has ever manifested itself in divine revelations from the time of Moses and the Prophets, down to modem days. These manifestations of the Jewish genius are not a supernatural phenomenon, but form a part of the great eternal Law which governs all three life spheres, the cosmic, organic and social. The special field of operation of the Jewish genius, however, is the social sphere, and it is due to it that a unified historical development of humanity was made possible. The revelations of the Jewish spirit express the universal law in its entirety ; its past workings as well as its future operations, using the scientific formula of to-day with the same facility as formerly the proofs of imagination and feeling.--Moses Hess / Rome and Jerusalem; a study in Jewish nationalism
And here is a recent assessment of this movement:
The nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment was like a beam of light refracted through a prism into a spectral band of brilliant intellectual colors spread across Western Europe. The prism through which Jewish thought was refracted was a Jew born in Amsterdam in 1632, a Jew so modern in his thinking that the second half of the twentieth century has not yet caught up with him. Excommunicated by the Jews in the seventeenth century, abhorred by the Christians in the eighteenth century, acknowledged great in the nineteenth century, Baruch Spinoza will perhaps not be fully understood even in the twenty-first century. But perhaps by then Spinoza's philosophy will have become the basis of a world religion for neomodern man.--Max I. Dimont / Jews, God and History, p. 343
So I am inclined to agree with Waton that we are destined to become Jews via the philosophy of Spinoza.
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WAB
Veteran Member
Don't get me wrong, I think it's all very compelling.
I found myself being inordinately drawn to Judaism, and particularly Jewish individuals, early on in my life. Ever since I was young, my favorite people in various fields of endeavor were Jews: Woody Allen, my favorite filmmaker, Gustav Mahler, my favorite composer, Menke Katz, my favorite poet, Spinoza, my favorite philosopher by a million miles, the list goes on and on, literally.
However, I think it's a stretch to say that we're all destined to become Jews via Spinoza's philosophy. First of all, Spinoza may have been born a Jew but he was hardly an adherent to the Judaic tradition and faith. He was a secularist, and his interpretations of the Bible were as much to elucidate the New Testament in rational terms as the Old Testament. Also, if I remember correctly, Waton and Spinoza disagree with respect to the Kabbalah. Spinoza regarded the Kabbalah as pure superstition, and I believe he derides it quite soundly, if not in his books, in his letters, which are included in my volume of Shirley's translations of the Complete Works.
By and large, the language one uses can undermine and damage the force of their theories. Didn't Waton say, quite explicitly, that the Jews 'have the right to subordinate the rest of the world' to them, or some such? Sorry, I don't have any exact quotes at hand, but will do some more reading. Most readers will shy from such incendiary language, no matter to what great lengths Waton goes in explaining that this subjugation of the world to Judaism will be done peacefully, with ideas and reason, not force.
Apologies if I've misrepresented Waton. I've only just heard of him and it's hard to get any of his texts, though I have found one site where I can read complete books online. I've started one. Very interesting, and extremely compelling, but I proceed with great caution when I read such sweeping statements and pronouncements.
I wrote a novella wherein the protagonist is half-Jewish, called "Fireflies of the Dusk". I got that title from a Charles Reznikoff poem:
I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion
I will marshal against you
the fireflies of the dusk.
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WAB
Veteran Member
In my searches for Waton's works, I stumbled upon a blog run by a rabid anti-semite and read a few articles he has posted recently. It appears that holocaust denial is on the rise in certain areas in Europe: that's if this blogger's 'information' can be trusted. But I did see some really disturbing pictures of people with banners claiming the holocaust was a hoax: "the Holo-hoax" was one term for it.
This blogger I mention is so virulent, my skin began to crawl the more I read. He claims NO Jews were killed in Nazi Germany, or anywhere else, that it was all a hoax. Has this individual seen any of the thousands of films of atrocities that were committed to European Jews? I suppose all those films were of non-Jewish people being stripped naked, shot in the head, and shoved into mass graves? And what about the miles of film footage concerning the concentration camps? What about Jewish survivors who still have numbers tattooed on their ams? What of their harrowing testimony? All a bunch of Jewish propaganda, because they want to take over the world?
***(Which is why someone like Waton should have been more reserved in his writing! His work has served to feed anti-semites with exactly the kind of thing they want to hear, to bolster their theories. The anti-semites are GLAD that Waton wrote the books he did. He's a useful tool for their nasty lies and hate-speech.)***
I recently watched a documentary on the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese in 1937-38. The Japanese made the Nazis look like boyscouts by comparison. There exists plenty of film footage and photographs of atrocities, such as young girls, some of them as young as six!, who were raped and photographed in unspeakable ways. And yet, the documentary ends by showing a few Japanese nationalists demonstrating at a shrine in Tokyo (I believe) where a few of the Japanese leaders who were convicted of war crimes because of those atrocities are still venerated to this day. Apparently, these extremists believe that the Rape of Nanking is all a bunch of lies constructed to defame and slander the Japanese.
Unbelievable!
This blogger I mention is so virulent, my skin began to crawl the more I read. He claims NO Jews were killed in Nazi Germany, or anywhere else, that it was all a hoax. Has this individual seen any of the thousands of films of atrocities that were committed to European Jews? I suppose all those films were of non-Jewish people being stripped naked, shot in the head, and shoved into mass graves? And what about the miles of film footage concerning the concentration camps? What about Jewish survivors who still have numbers tattooed on their ams? What of their harrowing testimony? All a bunch of Jewish propaganda, because they want to take over the world?
***(Which is why someone like Waton should have been more reserved in his writing! His work has served to feed anti-semites with exactly the kind of thing they want to hear, to bolster their theories. The anti-semites are GLAD that Waton wrote the books he did. He's a useful tool for their nasty lies and hate-speech.)***
I recently watched a documentary on the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese in 1937-38. The Japanese made the Nazis look like boyscouts by comparison. There exists plenty of film footage and photographs of atrocities, such as young girls, some of them as young as six!, who were raped and photographed in unspeakable ways. And yet, the documentary ends by showing a few Japanese nationalists demonstrating at a shrine in Tokyo (I believe) where a few of the Japanese leaders who were convicted of war crimes because of those atrocities are still venerated to this day. Apparently, these extremists believe that the Rape of Nanking is all a bunch of lies constructed to defame and slander the Japanese.
Unbelievable!
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I'm quite pleased to find a Spinozist here. And I appreciate you taking a look at Waton.
Btw, your handle makes me think of a character played by John Candy on SCTV. Coincidence?
Well, you sure know your stuff. I haven't read what Waton says in his book on the Kabbalah. I'm looking forward to getting hold of it. He would certainly have known about Spinoza's dismissal of it.
The quotation comes from A Program for the Jews, an answer to all anti-semites, a program for humanity (note: this online version has annotations from a somewhat hostile critic). Here is the quotation in context:
According to Hitler, a race of a superior culture has a right to subordinate to itself the races of an inferior culture, and the race of the highest culture has a right to be the master over the whole earth and the whole human race. What follows? Since the Jews are the highest and most cultured people on earth, the Jews have a right to subordinate to themselves the rest of mankind and to be the masters over the whole earth. Now, indeed, this is the historic destiny of the Jews, but not in the sense of Hitler and the nazis. With Jesus, who only symbolizes the Jews, the Jews say: Our kingdom is not of this world. The Jews will become the masters over the whole earth and they will subordinate to themselves all nations, not by material power, not by brute force, but by light, knowledge, understanding, humanity, peace, justice and progress. Judaism is communism, internationalism, the universal brotherhood of man, the emancipation of the working class and the human society. It is with these spiritual weapons that the Jews will conquer the world and the human race. The races and the nations will cheerfully submit to the spiritual power of Judaism, and all will become Jews.
And it shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it, and many peoples shall go and say: Come ye, and let us go up to the top of the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem. And He shall judge between the nations , and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.- Isaiah.
And it shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of Jehovah's house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it, and many peoples shall go and say: Come ye, and let us go up to the top of the mountain of Jehovah, to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of Jehovah from Jerusalem. And He shall judge between the nations , and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.- Isaiah.
I disagree with you here. So what if the anti-semites make hay out of what he says? They are doomed, and all the sooner thanks to his daring to write as he did.
WAB
Veteran Member
You're right.
However, I am not anywhere near convinced that the world will ultimately orient itself to Judaic values. I have noticed the power of that tradition, and its force in the world.
I found at least one of Spinoza's dismissals of the Kabbalah, in his Theological-political Treatise. I found this bit in my volume of Shirley's translations; but the following is from the Elwes translation, which I have on Kindle and which are all over the Internet:
*Shirley's translation reads 'asterisks'. I'm not qualified (not in the least) to say which is more correct. Just thought it interesting to point out.
***Oops, forgot: Nope, I'm not aware of the John Candy character. My name is William A. Baurle. When I signed up here I just typed in WilliamB, without much thought. For a brief while, after my religious conversion, I changed my handle to Gulielmus Beta. Then I changed it back, when I discovered that Aleister Crowley and his group of acolytes liked to take on Latinized names. I want no possible association with that group.
However, I am not anywhere near convinced that the world will ultimately orient itself to Judaic values. I have noticed the power of that tradition, and its force in the world.
I found at least one of Spinoza's dismissals of the Kabbalah, in his Theological-political Treatise. I found this bit in my volume of Shirley's translations; but the following is from the Elwes translation, which I have on Kindle and which are all over the Internet:
[emphasis mine]
*Shirley's translation reads 'asterisks'. I'm not qualified (not in the least) to say which is more correct. Just thought it interesting to point out.
***Oops, forgot: Nope, I'm not aware of the John Candy character. My name is William A. Baurle. When I signed up here I just typed in WilliamB, without much thought. For a brief while, after my religious conversion, I changed my handle to Gulielmus Beta. Then I changed it back, when I discovered that Aleister Crowley and his group of acolytes liked to take on Latinized names. I want no possible association with that group.
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