Kyronea, while some people might enjoy it, I sure don't. It's never about having fun for me. It's about exposing the poisonous lies or blissful ignorance of others.
Surely that is fun?
People need to have more fun in their lives. Really. It helps.
Fun clouds the perception.
Anyway, that Socratic bit said, on what I was talking about before, I have a quote that might serve as a bit of a vindication.
'Now take the acquisition of knowledge; is the body a hinrance or not, if one takes it into parnership to share an investigation? What I mean is this: isthere any certainty in human sight or hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear nor see anything accurately? Yet if these senses are not clear and accurate, the rest can hardly be so, because they are all inferior to the first two. Then when is it that the soul arives at truth? When it tires to investigate anything with the help of the body, it is obviously led astray. Is it not in the course of reflection, if at all, that the soul gets a clear view of the facts? Surely the soul can best reflect when it is free of all distractions such as hearing or sight or pain or pleasure of any kind - that is, when it ignores the body and becomes as far as possible independent, avoiding all physical contacts and associations as much as it can, in its search for reality. Then here too - in despising the body and avoiding it, and endeavouring to become independent - the philosopher's soul is ahead of all the rest. Here are some more questions, Simmias. Do we recognize such a thing as absolute uprightness? And absolute beauty and goodness, too? Have you ever seen any of these things iwth your eyes? Well, have you ever apprehended them with any other bodily sense? By "them" I mean not only absolute tallness or or health or strength, but the real nature of any given thing - what it actually is. Is it hrough the body that we get the truest perception of them? Isn't it true that in any inquirely you are more likely to attain more nearly to knowledge of your object in proportion to the care and accuracy with which you have prepared yourself to understand that object itself? Don't you think taht the person who is likely to succeed in this attempt most perfectly is the one who approaches the object, as far as possible, with the unaided intellect, without taking account of any ssense of sight in his thinking, or dragging any other sense into his reckoning - the man who pursues the truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of the body, as an inpediment which by its presence prevents the soul from attaining to truth and clear thinking? Is not this the person, Simmias, who will reach the goal of reality, if anybody can?' - Phaedo, 65:9-66:8
It's interesting, because I had not read this before now. However it seems to be that, in arguing my case earlier, I was following similar thought-patterns for my philosophy. Even so, this all says it in far clearer words than I was capable of. There is this concept that what is empiricle can only give a shadowy show of truth because it is always just a lesser form of an eternal absolute. To truly understand a thing means to examine it apart from the limiting constraints, and examine the absolutes. This, though impossible to do entirely within life, can at least be striven for. The questions that is being asked is 'what stands behind this?' Truth is not found inherent in a thing, but behind it, and as such an empiricle analysis cannot give us anything more than a semi-complete answer as to the truth of a thing. This can be seen by the examination of such concepts of 'beauty'. For the relative concept to exist (ie. a thing is more beautiful than another), there must be an absoulte standard by which to define it (that is a logical neccessity.) As such, there is then something that might be called True Beauty, but since everything we see is only on the relative scale of it, we will never be able to understand the truth of the matter using empirical examination of the senses - it must be considered in isolation apart from them if any real understanding is to be reached. This was at the core of my critisism empirical approaches.
You must remember, this was written in a time when empirical science was being very much pursued.
