Reasons for choosing a world view

Rational discussions on metaphysical and abstract topics.
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Cerastes
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Re: Reasons for choosing a world view

Post by Cerastes »

obnoxion wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 10:42 am I think it is important to have holes and cracks in one's world view. The unseen and the unnutterable must have free space to move snd breath.
Agreed.
This reminds me on an old Leonard Cohen song: "There's a crack in everything that's how the light gets in“
“Granny Weatherwax was not lost. She wasn't the kind of person who ever became lost. It was just that, at the moment, while she knew exactly where SHE was, she didn't know the position of anywhere else.”
(Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
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Polyhymnia
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Re: Reasons for choosing a world view

Post by Polyhymnia »

Cerastes wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 5:11 pm This reminds me on an old Leonard Cohen song: "There's a crack in everything that's how the light gets in“
I love LC ;__; Great reference.
"Limited love asks for possession of the beloved, but the unlimited asks only for itself." -Kahlil Gibran
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Noname
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Re: Reasons for choosing a world view

Post by Noname »

As we live in an age of inverted magician, where we focus on mastering the environment - but not our inner selves, we live in a fragmented world of the profane, where sacred spaces are far and in between, fragmentary locations of our own sacred spaces from which to orient from. We have created a seemingly large chasm between our inner self and the world, the hero, the knower for many chooses to stay in the mundane, for crossing that chasm could be considered a terrible adventure to undertake because of the stories we hear, if not fruitless for them. Would such a person meet a master of the two worlds, who merrily leaps and dances between both - they would come across the Father face - who is the truth, imagine the terror. Fear of the unknown is an abyss we must all cross, yet to an unprepared adventurer the chasm between the known and the unknown would be such an undertaking should they hear the truth, they would probably reject it in its entirety and return to whatever task they had at hand in the mundane.

So should a master magician, who knows the sun, the moon and the stars even speak the truth? Or should they tell new stories, that instead of instilling fear of terrible mights and terrors that lurk in the dark, whisper in soft whispers of delight and promise of something far greater? Good-natured ruse of an seducing finger calling the hero towards the unknown, a sirens song so unresistable, a lullaby of call to innocence (in Finnish, viaton has root 'without a fault') that would cause a ceaseless rallying cry that would send the men to the seas to find it for centuries to come - ask me, is all the world view we need. After all, its all a bunch of stories, those who want to see what they want to see will see that, as they always have - but if a story speaks the truth, those who wish to find it will find it.
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Cancer
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Re: Reasons for choosing a world view

Post by Cancer »

Nefastos wrote: Thu May 23, 2019 9:57 am Would we need some more spirit of "divine Plato" (search after truth because of its own sake) in our world view building?
Or do you see the question in a different manner?
Is the world so shattered that hope for truth has followed God to death, and we now live the age of "whatever works"?
I don't find anything to object to in OP's observation itself - actually I think it's very pertinent. But the implication, seen here as well as in other posts, that the epistemic state of people on average was somehow better in the past I find really far-fetched. If the "God" in "God is dead" is a worldview / set of values that an entire culture shares, then its death is unambiguously good for rationality / more people having more beliefs that align with reality. The "market" of worldviews in today's society is far from the manasic ideal of people truly putting their beliefs to the test, but it is much closer to that than a single arbitrarily prescribed worldview that is not questioned even on the level of "do I personally like this".

And if "God" here is taken to mean an ideal of striving for truth - rather than a fixed set of beliefs - then there is no point at all in situating its more complete actualization in the past. Sometimes I'm really quite bothered by the tendency of occultists to idealize societies like ancient Athens (which I use as an example because of the reference to Plato), seeing as most of them were incredibly brutal slave states. I don't know if Plato has written anything comparable, but I recall at least Aristotle having an actual defence of slavery somewhere in his works.

Anyway, when it comes to this thread's topic proper, I think people and their belief systems would benefit the most from psychological self-awareness - from knowing what one wants to be true and why. It is impossible to wholly escape these self-serving motivations in ones reasoning, so the best course of action is trying to be honest about them. I remember seeing this thought in a very clear, fresh way after hearing of the existence of an academic discipline called "fan-theory" or something like that, like a field of study about what it means to be a fan of something. I was suddenly struck by how many of my thought processes must be conditioned by what I find cool, desirable, admirable. This doesn't necessarily mean skewed reasoning on a small scale, when examining a specific question, but more likely what I find cool etc. - whan I'm a "fan" of - determining which questions I find worth asking in the first place. Of course my more rationally derived values also influence what emotionally appeals to me, so the causal relation isn't one-sided, but it is certainly worth looking into.
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