hahaha

Bingo-bango!

😂

He's talking nonsense when he falsely claims that means matter less than ends; in reality it is the exact reverse... and if what he's saying is derived from metaphysics, then throw out all of metaphysics, as it all is diametrically opposed to reality. In all truth, means matter way more than ends do.

@@chissstardestroyer Peter Kreeft is not the first one to claim that the inversion of the concept of reality to a narrow mechanical and technological scientism started with Descartes. The skepticism of Descartes led himself to a dead end when he could not even fathom his own existence in his Discourse of Method and that even his famous “cogito ergo sum” sentence could be construed as a question whether he actually exists. He didn’t go as far as annihilating existence, but he was the ground for existentialism to reject reality.

@@chissstardestroyer I would say you are talking nonsense when you equate an entire field of study to the opposite of reality.

@@bcampbell8344 It *is* the opposite of reality for no other reason than certain elements of it diametrically contradict reality; so since if any part at all is false, then the entire thing is false, we must therefore throw out all elements of metaphysics and go with the grass-roots and start off there: with basic matter being the essence of reality, not some "form" nonsense regarding the "form of the body" (which by the way is DNA, not some 'spirit' nonsense!), so wake up, as you, and all those who stand with these spiritists are the ones who're talking nonsense.

@@chissstardestroyer Quick question for you, since basic matter is the essence of reality, as you say: where is it observed that all metaphysics is false?

I quote and translate an Italian Thomist: Heidegger's ethics is based on the concept of acting as being and for this reason in Heidegger ethics is both anthropological and metaphysical. And since acting says relationship, we find a sort of relational personalism. For him, action is a self-transcending like being-for-death (sein zum Tode), so as to be free for death (Freiheit zum Tode), in which the "possibility of being a whole" is realized; "Being for authentic death is man's most proper possibility" because in death man is before being, at the definitive summit of his own free decision, a being that appears to him as nothing, but that is that and that is what he himself is. In Heidegger, there is no room for relationship as an accident of the person: the very being of the individual is a being for life or death. For Heidegger, I am essentially "guilty" and anguished, but precisely in this acknowledging myself guilty and making it my own, precisely deciding to be what I am, makes me appear my "original being-for the being of my most proper Being". This decision consists in my "self-planning anguished and tacit in my most proper being-guilty". Now, Heidegger continues, "being guilty is proper to the being of Being and means being the null foundation of a nothingness." But precisely in this decision to be-for-death, to let death "become master of the existence of Being there", that I "understand the effective possibilities of my Being there". The understanding of this possibility of this gives me, according to Heidegger, "an imperturbable joy." Here the resonances of the simul justus et peccator Lutheran stuck in the Hegelian dialectic of the negative (death, nothing) as a producer of the positive (life, being) are evident. But it should also be noted that the negation of being by nothingness in the dynamics of acting introduces a factor of conflict into human existence, which assumes a social aspect in the footsteps of Hegelian dialectics, with the difference that while in Hegel the dialectical polarity has a logical character, in Heidegger we have an existential dialectic, for which we do not have a conflict of concepts as in Hegel, but the opposition of life and death, a circularity where it does not seem that life has victory, because for Heidegger nothingness enters into the very destiny of man, even if this nothing seems to belong not to the sphere of the entity of reason, but to the horizon of the sacred. Heidegger, as is well known, claims to find the authentic original philosophizing in the Parmenides doctrine of being, in that of Heraclitus' becoming and in that of Anaximander's Infinity, without forgetting Cartesian's ego-logic voluntarism. In Heidegger's social ethics we therefore find a mixture of elements coming from Luther with others, completely opposite, coming from Nietzsche, all within the horizon of a conception of being, which joins as in Hegel, Parmenides with Heraclitus, being and time. The result of these juxtapositions is his characteristic conception of man as the "here" of being, that is, as the place and time of the appearance and presence of being to this man here, who is me in an emotional situation and I wonder about being; being understood as transcendent of being. I find myself thrown into the world in a state of dejection, guilt, anguish and precariousness: my being is being-for-death. Heidegger's gnoseological background is not realistic, but idealistic. The truth of knowledge for him does not lie in the adaptation of judgment to the external thing, but in the experience of the truth of being that reveals itself to me as the presence of the present. So I am not in contact through the senses with a reality outside myself, but only with my self-consciousness, for which being is being thought. I do not have a real relationship with things outside of me, but I have, indeed I am a subsisting and existential relationship of me as the "here and now" of being ("house of being") and being as being ("shepherd of being"). The relation in Heidegger corresponds to the categories of the "here" of Being there. This "here and now" is me, as an entity that in time poses the question of being. In this way I am not only the questioner, but also the asked, so that being man comes for him to coincide with being, but not with simple being, but with being there because I am here and now, in time and space, within the horizon of that being and therefore of that being about which I question myself. As in Husserl, also for Heidegger, in the line of Descartes, I am relative to myself because I am conscious of myself. This "I am", therefore, is the being of which I am aware and which I myself am. The relation, therefore, also in Heidegger, as for all idealists, is the relationship of consciousness of the ego with itself and itself, of the empirical ego with the "I" or ego absolute and vice versa. There is thus according to Heidegger the ascending relationship of the empirical ego, the existential ego, to the ego absolute, the being; and there is the descending relationship of being with the "here and now", that is, with my empirical self, being-for-death, dejected and thrown, guilty and anguished. But the descent corresponds to ascent, that is, pre-understanding (Vorverständnis), remembering thinking (an-denken), authentic existence, care, being-in-the-world, things-to-hand (Dingen zu Handen), being-with (mitsein), going-forward, transcendence, planning, ecstasy, language, freedom. The descending relationship includes the sacred, the nothingness, the event (Ereignis), the revelation, the clearing (Lichtung), the opening (Offenheit), the presence of the present, destiny. Heidegger's social ethics are inspired by Hegel's social ethics, centered on obedience to the state and belonging to the state. Thus, the individual is completely dependent on the State and relative to the State, which, in its head, the prince - for Heidegger the Führer of the National Socialist regime - is the absolute Substance of the multiplicity of individuals. Heidegger clarifies the will to power of the State by making use of the Nietzschean concept of the will to power, which for Nietzsche, as Heidegger explains, is nothing more than being as a will that wants itself, according to the definition of the will already given by Hegel. Therefore, absolute relationship is an absolute voluntarism that is identified, as already in Schelling and Fichte, in being as action (Fichte) and freedom (Schelling), for which the Absolute exists because it wanted to exist. The being of which Heidegger speaks is Nietzsche's will to power. This can be seen from the praise he gives to this conception, which therefore for him has nothing to do with the "esse" (being) as the "actus essendi" (act of being) of St. Thomas. The comparison, therefore, that some have made, between the difference between entity and being in Thomas from that of Heidegger, does not hold absolutely, because while for Thomas the transcendent being is supreme perfection and supreme goodness, for Heidegger it is nothingness with respect to the entity and represents only the finiteness and temporality of the entity, which for Heidegger, is the man who asks about being. For this reason, in Heidegger's ethics the theme of love and goodness are completely absent, and the whole moral question lies in the freedom and authenticity of the existential ego in the dimension of temporality and finiteness, in relation to the pre-categorical and emotional experience of being as being there. It is true that in Heidegger's philosophy and even in the Letter on Humanism of 1947, the "divine God" appears, but the polemic against the Christian conception of God, which he contemptuously called "onto theology", as if it were a gross fantasy, makes us understand that his "sacred" and his "divine" are none other than that of Hölderlin, as he himself explains in the book dedicated to him, the sacred in the Germanic mythology that was at the center of the National Socialist conception, which he supported, of the German state and people.

Man ("Being there") is understood as essentially oriented to death that discloses to him in anguish his authentic being as unconditional and unsurpassable. "Freedom for death's sake" is dying as the supreme and definitive moment of maturation and progress of freedom, as we have seen. But Heidegger's source is Hegel. Hegel has some pages of the Phenomenology of the Spirit of extraordinary concentration and density, where the philosopher expresses to us in a few bars of powerful expressiveness and suggestive depth his way of understanding the essence and action of the "Spirit", a fundamental notion of Hegelian philosophy, the central notion, the cardinal notion, capital, to which we are in possession, of the secret of Hegel's system. What does Hegel mean by Spirit? Undoubtedly, for him the infinite, eternal and absolute Spirit is God. He says this several times in his works. The Spirit is the Absolute, it is the Subject, it is the Idea, it is the Concept, it is the Thought, it is the Reason, it is the Becoming, it is the History, it is God. But here immediately come the problems, because the Spirit is "dialectical". Or, as Hegel says, it is "syllogism." It is not a pure yes, but it is yes and no. It is not the"ipsum Esse per se subsistens" of St. Thomas, a perfect interpretation of Ex 3:14 and of the "I Am" pronounced several times by Christ. But it is being-not-being that for Hegel would be Becoming. Moreover, Hegel has that famous phrase extremely indicative of his theology and spiritualism: "God would not be God without the world." God is also connected with matter. So also corporeality and matter, with all their traverses and vicissitudes, misfortunes, conflicts, failures, suffering, evil, death belong to God. God is a God-in-the-world, immanent in the world. God is not in heaven, but on earth. This is why for him the Spirit is "Becoming", because the world is evidently in becoming, change, history, alternation of life and death. So Hegel's Spirit is not pure Life, but life-death-life. This is why for him the Spirit is the "spirit of the world", while we know well what the spirit of the world is for Saint Paul: it is the devil, the one whom Christ calls "prince of the world". And we are at the decisive point: all that remains is to conclude that Hegel, in the concept of the Spirit, confuses God with Satan. Moreover, God for Hegel is instead as for St. Thomas the identity of being and knowing, and, as for Aristotle, self-consciousness ("nòesis noèseos"); Hegel thus conceives not only the divine being, but the being as such, falling into pantheism. Hegel does not believe in a pure, unchanging Spirit separated from matter. In this, if he referred only to the human spirit, we could agree; But the fact is that he does not conceive spirit if not connected to matter and in the end his own gnoseological idealism ("being is thought") turns into materialism, since being is also material being: and if thought coincides with being, it will end up coinciding with matter. Let us remember that Marx is nothing more than an inverted Hegel, as Marx himself affirmed. Therefore, to understand what the Spirit is and how it acts according to Hegel, it is necessary to know how to handle the dialectic of yes and no and to keep in mind that the identity of Being with Thought does not concern only God but being as such. Hence, his pantheism. The Spirit, for Hegel, is founded on the Intellect and based on the Denial. In the midst of profound intuitions, sinister flashes are not lacking, which make us understand or glimpse that Hegel tragically mixes the divine with the diabolical, the gods or "Odin" with the Christian God. The big trouble with Hegelian spiritualism, despite his taste for opposition, is that he never distinguishes the good spirit from the bad spirit, but the spirit seems to be both good and bad. He never speaks of a Holy Spirit, even when he speaks of the Trinity. The principle that life lives in death and death lives in life is evident here. Life must not flee death, but must be with it. Only in this way can he overcome it by obtaining that death produces life. So for Hegel it is not life that produces life by denying death, but it is death that produces life from the negation of life, denying itself. In Hegel, we do not find the words of the paschal hymn, "Vita et mors mirando conflixere ", because all in all, life and death, without ceasing to quarrel, coexist in the dialectical synthesis, which does not remove the conflict, but overcomes it and covers it, like Lutheran grace, which does not take away sin, but subjugates it. Hence, a legalization, indeed a divinization, of death. Death also wants its part in the concept of Spirit and divinity. From here comes Heideggerian being-for-death, from which flow authentic being and life (the "unconditional" and the "unsurpassable"). "And be-for-death", sein zum Tode, is not the Franciscan "brother, remember that you must die", because you must give an account to God of your works, it is not a reminder of the expiatory value of death, but an expectation of death as "moment of the definitive fullness of freedom", as if death were productive not because it is the expiatory death of Christ, but simply as death. Hence, the saying of Freemasonry "no life without death and no death without life".

And yours find a place between these two 50s.

Are you sure about that?

@@ironymatt Uncertainty and a deep-seated feeling of personal insecurity is the way of the skeptic. It is this which he projects onto the rest of the world.

@@alwaysgreatusa223 yes, agreed. I was being tongue-in-cheek

@@ironymatt Good One !

Animals don’t reason in the way we do

@@Turtletanks I am not sure of the science on animal ability to reason but in this case I am just pointing out they share a lower level of reasoning with us. I don't see where we disagree.

@@kerwinbrown4180 it’s more of a philosophical topic but we don’t tend to observe animal behavior that demonstrates abstract capabilities. An animal can behave preferentially to any instinct, but we don’t usually observe any sort of “future planning” that relies on the capacity of reason

@@Turtletanks Thank you as I had not thought about that.

@@kerwinbrown4180 I’ll point out, however, that not a few empiricist types (though I’ve yet to meet a truly honest empiricist) will often reject that notion. They subscribe to the view that humans are no different from lesser creatures

What is Islamophobic about him? He does fear islam or disrespect islam. Truth≠disrespect. I have read many books by him and he is far more complimentary of muhammad than he should be if he is an islamophobe. Btw, islamophobe is a word created in the late 20th century. The meaning is really an irrational understanding of those critical to islam.