The text you quoted from me was a response to the work culture views you had linked to. My disagreement with the utility of the division is not based upon my theory of the stupid. My disagreement was a rejection of the idea that people operate strictly on one basis or another. The world of actual work shows that these elements are all mushed together in real and very short time. That, in any case, has been my experience.

In regards to personal experience, safeguarding against the stupid does involve countervailing against over-confidence but that quality is not a sufficient cause for the problem. The humbler person still needs to keep the risk of being stupid to a minimum. Freezing up and taking no risk is not an option. The world knocks at your door.

You seem to be suggesting it is something we pin the tail upon like the donkey in the parlor game.

There is a play on words here because the lie being discussed is about being born from the earth instead of from human parents. The ensuing discussion reveals the purpose of the lie is to diminish the power of inherited positions in society.

The Greek is:
γενναῖόν τι ἓν ψευδομένους πεῖσαι μάλιστα μὲν καὶ αὐτοὺς τοὺς ἄρχοντας, εἰ δὲ μή, τὴν ἄλλην πόλιν;

The first meaning of γενναῖος, the word translated as "noble", is to be true to one's birth. In this case, Socrates argues that the lie is said to reflect a truth our circumstances of birth misrepresent.

While on the topic of Greek words, the word translated as "lie" is from ψεῦδος. As a verb, it means to cheat as well as to speak falsely. However justified the practice may be or not, the text is not hiding from the unpleasant associations of the act as an act.

Glaucon says at 414d:

"“It’s not without reason,” he said, “that you were ashamed for so long to tell the lie.”

In regards to the subject of lies, noble or otherwise, Socrates does say this:

“But surely truth is also something that needs to be taken seriously. Because if we were speaking rightly just now, and a lie by its very nature is useless to gods, though useful to humans in the form of medicine, it’s clear that such a thing needs to be granted to doctors and not handled by laymen.”

“That’s clear,” he said.

“So it’s appropriate for the rulers of the city, if for anyone at all, to lie for the benefit of the city as far as either enemies or citizens are concerned, but for everyone else, such a thing is not to be touched. [389C] But we’ll declare that for a private citizen to lie to the rulers is the same thing, and a greater fault, as for a sick person not to tell the truth about the things happening to his body to a doctor, or someone in training to a trainer, or as for someone who doesn’t tell the helmsman the things that are about the ship or the sailors concerning the way he or any of his shipmates are doing.”

“Most true,” he said. [389D]

“Then if someone catches anyone else in the city lying, Any of those who are workmen for the public,
Prophet or healer of sicknesses or joiner of wood, he’ll punish him for bringing in a practice as subversive and destructive for a city as for a ship.” — Translated by Joe Sachs, Republic, 389B

According to Norman Gulley 'Plato's Theory of Knowledge', Plato introduces the theory of forms and anamnesis (Meno) because of his awareness of the limitations of the Socratic method of questioning, and in the attempt to develop a constructive theory of knowledge. — Wayfarer

I figure the Parmenides dialogue argues that Gulley has the sequence backwards.

At 133, the separation of the forms from our reality creates the largest obstacle to using them as an explanatory principle. "If nothing can be like the form, nor can the form be like anything."

During 134:

Parmenides: Whereas the knowledge in our world will be knowledge of the reality in our world and it will follow again that each branch of knowledge in our world must be knowledge of some department of things that exist in our world.
Socrates: Necessarily.
Parmenides: But, as you admit, we do not possess the forms themselves, nor can they exist in our world.
Socrates: No.
Parmenides: And presumably the forms, just as they are in themselves, are known by the form of knowledge itself?
Socrates: Yes.
Parmenides: The form we do not possess.
Socrates: True.
Parmenides: Then none of the forms is known by us, since we have no part in knowledge itself.
Soc: Apparently not. — Translated by F.M. Cornford

But Parmenides does agree at 135b to the use of the forms since we have few other options if we are to proceed through dialogue:

Socrates: I admit that, Parmenides, I quite agree with what you are saying.

Parmenides: But on the other hand, if in view of these difficulties and others like them, if, a man refuses to admit that forms of things exist or to distinguish a definite form in every case, he will have nothing on which to fix his thought, so long as he will not allow that each thing has a character which is always the same, and in so doing he will completely destroy the significance of all discourse. But of that consequence I think you are only too well aware.

Socrates: True. — Ibid

From this point of departure, "developing a constructive theory of knowledge" requires the dialectic approach rather than the abandonment of it.

In regards to the "constitution of the world", the argument Plotinus makes against the Gnostics can fairly be applied to Christianity, as it has come to be in its various expressions. Is this the best of all possible worlds or is it and us in in need of salvation?

Augustine may have appropriated the language of Plotinus to support a Monist view of nature but Plotinus would never have accepted the view that a City of God was struggling against the City of Man. In that respect, the term "Christian Platonist" is an oxymoron.

I figure we have read many of the same texts. The "Gnostic" language is different from the opposition against it. What is the best way to represent the difference?

I don't think Kierkegaard meant to distance himself from the problem of "inherited" sin and its relationship to the sins of a person might commit during a life. He strove to verify the language of revelation with his view of the human condition. His approach is similar to how Pascal argued that the Incarnation was scandalous to reason while also being the most accurate description of the problem of being human.

There is an obvious conflict between arguing on the basis of experience anybody could have and recognizing an element that sets people apart. In the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard distinguishes what can be known as truth on the basis of our nature {and the recollection of it} with a truth that we would have to be conditioned to apprehend.

He goes on to graft the whole of the Christian story upon this distinction. It is mostly interesting to myself as something heard without anything following. But it is clear that was not Kierkegaard's intention. He was a Christian who had no qualms pissing off other Christians. His Works of Love is a smack in the face to anyone who thought it could be easy.

I work in a very task-oriented culture, to use the language of Forsyth. Both sets of management skills discussed in the articles are needed, however. Unlike the Forsyth model, the workers I encounter (including myself) are both types of people simultaneously. They are trusted to produce at a certain level and judged upon whether they can perform or not on that basis. They also must navigate the problems of being with other people and the prospects of working for an outfit in the future.

The problem of being stupid shows up at each place where decision happens. There is the ever present problem of safety. What is dangerous for one artist is less so for another. That sort of thing is managed by management but success or failure is mostly a matter of individuals taking care of themselves or not. No set of protocols will ever be more important than that.

The other problem with stupid has to do with order of process. What should happen when?

And there is the problem of resources. Every outfit has managers competing for the best people in an organization to work for them. What is that like? These culture models are weak beer in addressing the problem.

I think it's important to differentiate Plato from gnosticism generally. I don't know that much about it but I do know that Plotinus was opposed to the Gnostics. — Wayfarer

Plotinus was not only opposed but dedicated to the task of discrediting the Gnostics, root and branch. The following does not include important references and context but does convey some of the passion of the argument:

No one has the right to find fault with the constitution of the world for it reveals the greatness of intelligible nature. — Ennead II 9, section 8. Translated by Joeseph Katz

That's basically the same statement as "economy needs growth". Why does capital need investment? To increase it? — Thunderballs

New projects are proposed and carried out on the assumption that the investors will get more out of the result than whatever is payed out to have it happen. Economy, in that sense, is how different people respond to how the desire to earn profit might collide with other interests.

It's a well known "fact": economy needs growth. But what's the thought behind this? — Thunderballs

Capital needs investment. The existing value is staked against a future result. Return on Investment is the basis of every Bank that records these wagers. The results of the gamble determines who has dough and who does not.

Did I leave something out?

Just a passing thought; but, if intelligence is what Plato called nous, then is its modern assessment defined by psychometrics testing, as IQ? — Shawn

Testing for IQ does reveal ability to perform well in the controlled environment of the test itself. Some people who are capable in this sense are also able to do other things, others, not so much.

Is the idea of Nous an expectation to understand more than we do or an explanation for why we are so clueless despite strenuous efforts to be less ignorant?

Aristotle answers this question in a direct fashion that I appreciate. To summarize:

We wonder what is going on in this place we have arrived. The wonder is natural, not as a description but the discovery of a condition of knowing very little. We seek knowledge for the sake of knowing. The desire is different from wanting to produce better or get our way in the world. It is its own thing.

To not accept the desire on those terms is an argument. To accept them is simply acceptance.

Sounds philosophical to me.
Hegel wrote a book with that as a title.
Are you interested in some kind of summary of arguments?
Toward what end?

Why do you conceptualize this as "stupid", and not as confident? — baker

I am proposing that stupidity is not the sort of property that is revealed by listing the common characteristics of stupid people. One can observe that there are different kinds of "intelligence" and ability in one kind is no guarantee of proficiency at another. There is no similar way to talk about these differences in regards to being "stupid." Consider this essay on the use of "stupid" in Victorian Literature.

The view I take is even less particularly personal than the one considered in the essay. In the sphere of production, the need to constrain the destructive capacity creates a dynamic where contempt for the stupid makes it more powerful on many levels. This factor is multiplied by having so many systems being dependent on wise responses in this regard. However that may be, I think the dynamic itself is as old as we are as a species.

So, not "selective attention" then but traumatically induced inability to attend? — Janus

The OP presents stupidity as a condition that exists in a different way than any sort of continuum where people operate with varying capacities and interests to learn new things. We all have to function somewhere along a continuum of learning capacity. Being stupid is recognized as something that happens to people throughout the continuum but particularly to those at the lower end of the learning ability scale. There is a punitive quality to being stupid, like getting hit on the head with a stick.

When used as pejorative, it implies a kind of will-fullness not present in being charged with being "clueless" or the like. It is as if Stupid had a life of its own.

And never sleeps. — 180 Proof


That's true and yet seems paradoxical in that sleep is the very essence and condition of stupidity. Thus the common injunction "wake up to yourself". Selective attention perhaps? — Janus

In that regard, it is interesting that the word comes from the Latin stupere, which means to be amazed or stunned as when hit on the head with a stick. That fits with my theory that the quality is not simply a deficiency pejoratively assigned to individuals but an agency that lives amongst people as trauma. Trauma has shown itself capable of reproduction.

In the context of trying to be less stupid in the performance of an art, it is more important to develop strategies to constrain some actions than try to eradicate the grounds of their existence. 400 blows was not enough for that.

That is a good point. Having some means of annotation that is made in the moment and can be found later.

What's the best way to learn philosophy?: — DesperateBeing

What do you think about a lot and wish you could understand better?
You are the only philosopher you have to answer to.

In the key of "mitigating the unwise decisions", I have a theory of stupid that developed from working as a project manager for a long time.

Stupid is not only an absence of understanding or skill, it is an active principle that seeks ways to circumvent attempts to contain its effects.

If one puts stupid in a corral, it will keep a constant eye on the gate. If the gate is left open for too long, stupid will get out. To counter this agency, a concentric ring of other corrals are built so the results of failures to restrain stupid are minimized.

In times when many gates are open simultaneously, that is when the destructive capacity of the agency is greatest.

Stupid wants to be free.

The primary function of psychiatric labels is that they absolve the "normal" folks from any responsibility for how they treat those on whom they pin those labels. People apparently need freedom like that. — baker

A lot of the people who have these labels pinned upon them are suffering and are the first to say they are. There are many problems with diagnosis and agendas of people making decisions in these matters is something clinical practice always has to deal with.

But to say the whole enterprise has nothing to do with trying to help people is more self indulgent than whatever you were imagining was going on amongst those doing the work.

Socrates defended himself as a citizen of Athens, striving to do the best he could for its sake. In the Republic, the City is only possible because of different citizens doing and making what others cannot. Respect for that inter-dependency is respect for the people actually doing it; including, in this case, the one assigned to kill him.

Or, what might be the same thing, one hard-working Athenian saluting the virtue of another.

I am not familiar with that work or author, Mr. Valentinus. Is he someone worth reading? — Leghorn

He is very much worth reading if you are interested in how the conditions of modern man relate to a desire for life as expressed through religious experience. The range of his scholarship is breathtaking and is an education even when one does not agree with him.

In chapter 10, Unamuno says:

And this relation with God, this more or less close union with Him, we call religion.
Yet what is religion? How does it differ from the religious sense and how are the two related? Every man's definition of religion is based upon his own inner experience of it rather upon his observation of it in others and it is impossible to define it without in one way or another experiencing it. — Unamuno, translated by Anthony Kerrigan

In the matter of longing for immortality, Unamuno does not like options he has been given. His work is an argument against the God he wishes to draw closer to. He refuses to go gently into the night.

In that respect, Unamuno's complaint differs greatly from Socrates' desire to keep living the same way as he had been doing. Socrates calmly swaggers toward the turnstiles, tipping his waiter on the way out.

Have some scholars interpreted the metaphor of being led out of the darkness and opinion of the cave into the light of the natural sun as a migration after death into heaven or Hades? I am not familiar with that. — Leghorn

I am not aware of any account that puts the matter in that way. Some Neoplatonists say Plato is teaching a personal transformation while one is alive. How well you prepare the soul will relate to its future possibilities. If you get out of the cave while alive, you have options others do not. Proclus has his version of this idea. "Platonism", in that vernacular, is a theology. One better get ready for the next stage.

Your observation about how Socrates wants to live after death does not fit with such an explanation: not because it disproves it but because it is without reference to it.

Unomuno makes a similar observation regarding the Catholic version of immortality. He gets the idea being proposed. He doesn't care if he cannot continue being who he is exactly as he is as a result.

Your reminder that Socrates is not asking for a different life after death than the one he is having while alive does suggest he does not expect to be wandering around outside the cave of the Republic after his death.

The point of view reminds me of Unomuno in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations where the desire for immortality is continuing to do the groovy things one was doing rather than turn the experience into anything else.

Time is not like a river, or, the metaphor is too narrow. — Constance

I was saying Alkis Piskas' view was like describing time as a river, not that it adequately described Kierkegaard's version of Eternity.

One has to step away from normalcy itself, and this is essentially the major Kierkegaardian premise, in order to receive the world in a profound and primordial way. — Constance

He is stepping away from the "normal" seen as a society that is content that the Christian values it purports have been integrated seamlessly with the world as Hegel presents it. On the other hand, it is the individual alone who receives the world in a profound and primordial way. So, for instance:

Viewed intellectually, the content of freedom is truth, truth makes man free. For this reason, truth is the work of freedom, and in such a way that freedom constantly brings forth truth. Obviously, I am not thinking of the cleverness of the most recent philosophy, which maintains that the necessity of thought is also its freedom, and which therefore, when it speaks about the freedom of thought, speaks only of the immanent movement of eternal thought. Such cleverness can only serve to confuse and to make the communication between men more difficult. On the other hand, what I am speaking about is very plain and simple, namely, that the truth is for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action. If the truth is for the individual in any other way, or if he prevents the truth from being for him in that way, we have the phenomenon of the demonic. Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being, will accept all its consequences, and not have an emergency hiding place for himself and a Judas kiss for the consequence.
In modern times, there has been enough talk about truth; now it is high time to vindicate certitude and inwardness, not in the abstract sense in which Fichte uses the word, but in an entirely concrete sense. — Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, IV A404, translated by Reidar Thomte

As a matter of the concrete, this view is being presented as a condition every person is operating within. The condition necessary for the condition is described as inclosing reserve in the previous chapter. Inclosing reserve can lead to freedom or un-freedom (as characterized by the demonic). The challenge this gives to our "normal" lives bears on how we understand the work of parenting and education. So, for instance:

If an observer will only pay attention to himself, he will have enough with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all possible states of the human soul. What I have to say could have significance, especially for everyone who deals with children or has any relation to them. It is of infinite importance that the child be elevated by the conception of lofty inclosing reserve and saved from the misunderstood types. In an outward respect, it is easy to determine when the moment arrives that one dares to let the child walk alone, in a spiritual respect, the task is very difficult, and one cannot exempt oneself by employing a nursemaid or by buying a walker. The are is that of constantly being present, and yet not being present, so the child may be allowed to develop himself, and at the same time one still has a clear view of the development. The art is to leave the child to himself in the very highest degree and on the greatest possible scale, and to express this apparent relinquishing in such a way that, unnoticed, one is aware of everything. If only one is willing, time for this can very well be found, even though one is a royal officeholder. If one is willing, one can do all things. And the father or the educator who has done everything else for the child entrusted to him, but has failed to prevent him from becoming closed up in his reserve, has at all times incurred a great liability. — Ibid, IV 393

With the above said, I return to agreeing that Kierkegaard understood what Banno referred to as "action as meaning" but I don't have a handle on how you are presenting this view of the human condition to bear as a matter of philosophy in the register of Heidegger and others.

The work of your namesake being a prime victim. — Fooloso4

Yes, indeed.
It is hard for a Gnostic Bishop to find work in this town.

Fact or Fiction, the story has had many consequences. Our lives have been interwoven in the story as a matter of it being repeated many times.

It is not like figuring out the motives of a character in a novel.

Some interpreted the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God as an internal transformation rather than the geo-political transformation envisioned in some messianic views. — Fooloso4

This view was strenuously deleted by the early Christian Fathers as a species of heresy.

If you do not think something is worth addressing, what is the point of saying that?
Why put down the inconsequential as you see it? Should not that all take care of itself?

Narcissism, as a diagnosis, is different from the classical references made to refer to a certain activity.

In the clinical sense, if it is not one condition, it is another. The importance of making a distinction is for the purpose of being closer to what is happening rather than further away. People have problems. How does one get closer to understanding them?

I see that you are dealing with these issues as a professional trying to help people. Trying to toss around different meanings of an old story is not equivalent to that process.

Is the way that is done interfering with developing helpful responses to existing problems?

It's been a while since I watched those lectures, but as far as I know they never touch on this specific subject. — Tzeentch

To be precise, the lectures do not address the absolute differences you claim to exist between "moral systems." The lectures claim Jesus was a Sage in the vernacular of the Hellenistic philosophies current at that time. Grimes also claims the "wisdom" traditions of the "Platonic" are incompatible with the "Hebraic." and that is how he can figure Jesus was not drawing from the world of Judaism as the source of his illumination.

If it was a text, I would quote it for you. I am not going to tell you where these things are said in the video. You will have to do that bit of work by yourself.

My take on K has reason trying to deal with something entirely outside of reason because reason attempts to embody, encompass, "totalize" the world by bringing all things to heel. — Constance

Whatever else one might want to say about Kierkegaard, your description captures his rejection of Hegel fair and square.

That is certainly the case.

I remember a Jewish comedian being asked why Christianity emerged. He said:

"We got too good at arguing with each other. Somebody called the cops. Then the neighbors got involved."

Your position is that, whoever he was, he was not speaking about or from Judaism. — Valentinus

This is not my position. — Tzeentch

That is Grime's position. For him, Jesus is a Sage in the Platonic tradition.

You are using Grime's work to claim that there is an absolute contradiction between the the old and new books in regards to, as you say, their respective moral systems.

Grimes is making the distinction between the Q document and Judaism in general, not specifically the Torah.
You are the one claiming there is a self evident contradiction between the Torah and that message.
Taken together, that is your position.

I take issue with both components.

I already explained that I wasn't saying that you were saying Jesus was not a Jew as a matter of identity. Your position is that, whoever he was, he was not speaking about or from Judaism. I take issue with that position.

If that hasn't made your position perfectly clear to yourself. You will need to find help elsewhere.

And what truth would that be?

I watched your video. You made some ill informed comments. The only assumption I have made so far is that there is some connection between the two events.
I am beginning to think you haven''t listened to the lecture.