refuting relativism

[Clodfobble]

I've never had a philosopher do anything but put me to sleep... Maybe they're mosquitos with West Nile?

[mrnoodle]

lookout, you got my half of it 99.1% right. I have nothing against philosophy per se. Or at least I see nothing wrong with mental self-pleasuring. The failure of humanist philosophy as I see it is that it discounts an entire swath of the human condition - spirituality - without so much as a second glance, yet its followers still want to be seen as pure students of that condition. And they're not. They're bringing the same bias to the table as anyone else, but it's cloaked in this scholarly, nose-in-the-air demeanor that defies anyone to call it out.

All of the philosophers mentioned were highly intelligent and certainly were very influential. My opinion is that in dismissing the concept of God from square one, they set themselves on a path that ended in a skewed vision of humanity. And whereas there are fundamentalist Christians who do the same thing, there are many intelligent, well-read, logic-minded Christian people who arrived at their conclusions by examining ALL sides of the issue. They weren't born Christian, in fact many were devout atheists throughout their professional lives. When they allowed themselves the scandalous luxury of examining God from a purely unbiased standpoint, however, many of them understood the truth.

Or what I "believe" to be the truth.

[jaguar]

The human what?

psyche. I think the term was coined is the 17th century, might want to look into that.

lookout - there is black and white but there is also grey. I don't mind mrnoodle's starting position, though I consider it wrong. I mind that he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

[mrnoodle]

Ok, you get the last word on it. I don't feel like parrying your insults all day.

[Catwoman]

No one has the right to be religious. Defining a force less tangible than physics, you know, the one acknowledged by agnostics (the only worthy philosophical stance) is ridiculous, because you don't know. You don't know there is a god, because no-one knows anything above imprecise emotional/spiritual cataclysms and educated guesses. Just accept it, and enjoy a mind open to the possibility that there may be a god, there may just be something you don't quite understand, or there may be nothing.

You don't know. Stop arguing.

(I'm not being relativist. I'm right.)

[jaguar]

didn't see your post when I wrote mine.
See the essay Existentialism Is a Humanism - Sartre. There'll be a copy online somewhere I'm sure.
This is my point, you don't understand or have not read the material you're trying to refute.

[mrnoodle]

Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair.

I say that existentialism, and Sartre, failed. If Sartre's own insanity and plunge into despair isn't evidence enough, then break his existentialism into its basic parts.

One man's actions define the condition of Man, and Man's condition defines the actions of one man. Yet you "deceive yourself" if you say that a will other than your own is being imposed on you when you choose an action. Those two statements negate each other. Sartre claims that "it is not for me to judge [a self-deceiver] morally..." then in the same paragraph claims, "Furthermore, I can pronounce a moral judgement. For I declare..."

There is no amount of pleasant, intellectual-sounding essay that can disguise the fact that atheistic existentialism is based on the circular argument that we can fashion a universality through our individual actions, and that our individual actions are the product of our universality.

Having decided that God didn't exist, Sartre spent the rest of his life trying to prove that it didn't matter anyway, and he went nuts. It's complete conjecture on my part, but I would imagine his internal battles were quite fierce, and only when the existentialist side won over in his mind did he actually put anything on paper.

[jaguar]

First you tried to claim that modern philosphy was somekind of feelgood 'chicken for the soul' now you're trying to claim it's all depressing and sends you mad. Sartre going 'nuts' is news to me, I'm sure it would have been news to him too.

Sartre believed that good and bad faith were states of being, not moral concepts. Don't cherry pick, it's transparent.

One man's actions define the condition of Man, and Man's condition defines the actions of one man. Yet you "deceive yourself" if you say that a will other than your own is being imposed on you when you choose an action. Those two statements negate each other.

How? I think you need to re-read.

In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot consult it as a guide to action. And that is to say that I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act.

Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. However, if we are to have morality, a society and a law-abiding world, it is essential that certain values should be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them. It must be considered obligatory a priori to be honest, not to lie, not to beat one’s wife, to bring up children and so forth; so we are going to do a little work on this subject, which will enable us to show that these values exist all the same, inscribed in an intelligible heaven although, of course, there is no God. In other words – and this is, I believe, the purport of all that we in France call radicalism – nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom.