Francis Williams' Philosophy Blog

 in todays world, where tradition and morality are slowly being eroded by liberal movements, the individual is expected to be tolerant towards everything and anything. he will be afraid to criticize something which he sees as a change for the worse, something which goes against his upbringing or education. as a result of this forced tolerance he will have no use for any previously held moral values and will cease to practice them. this will cause him to lose his bearings in the world under which the general effect is a form of passiveness towards everything -a kind of passive nihilism. this will be the case in most people who are easily molded into society. in more extreme individuals however the result could be more dangerous to society: it could result in extremism, fundamentalism or fascism. this is the double edged sword of liberalism and the inevitable price that we have to pay for being tolerant.

 public intellectuals, thinktanks, universities and people at the forefront of progressive movements all have the same agenda: to make sure progress goes on unimpeded. even though they act on certain moral values, and will pose as philanthropists or defenders of such and such a cause, they all generally believe that the most important thing is that humanity survives and progresses, that at all costs civilization does not collapse. the question we have to ask however is really: is it really progress? another related question is: would it be too irrational and unthinkable to want to halt this so called progress? to prevent progress from happening? what if we are not meant to become an interplanetary civilization, what if we are not supposed to colonize mars. maybe we shouldn't assume that we are going to reach a singularity or that we will hand ourselves over to machines. moreover, what if society is on the brink of inevitable collapse and all we have left to do is to reboot the comp...

 merely the fact that there is a huge discrepancy between egoism and altruism means we should strive towards altruism. supposing psychological egoism to be true. as i have discussed elsewhere, we lack sufficient knowledge of the mind to make universal generalizations about our motives, they are simply too complex to fathom. but let us grant it as true for the sake of argument that humans are innately selfish and that is only a facade we put up when we are nice, and that egoism is an inescapable fact. precisely for this reason we should strive for altruism. because it raises us up from our animal nature in which we only look out for ourselves, to something sublime. that's why humans will never abolish altruism or any of its associated emotions like empathy, sympathy, compassion etc. maybe it is our ability to care for each other (no matter how false it may seem to us at the time) that makes us closer to divine beings. that's why nietzsche's project ails, because people look ...

 what use is moral philosophy or philosophy in general to the average person? not much. all this high falutin talk about virtue and vice, and discussion of simple concepts in terms of technical jargon is just the plaything of pseudointellectuals. no one needs to be that precise about their moral values, nobody is that obsessed with moralizing that they will need categories of values or complex arguments to support their actions. only the fewest people, mainly intellectuals, read moral philosophy, and most of them rarely enact what they have read or practice what they read. most people treat philosophy, like religion nowadays as a trivial accompaniment to their lives, like a pleasant bedside story that they read to themselves so they can sleep better. who is going to read all of kant's metaphysics of morals, and base his daily actions on the the strict observance of these principles? nobody. if you tell the average person on the street that you are a deontologist or a utilitarian, t...

 we have given ourselves the impression that we can arrest time, that we can control the forces of nature. museums keep artifacts preserved as long as possible, they store them in dry cool cabinets for as long as possible. we believe we can create immutable things, language has given us the concepts, the illusion that we can arrest time. as a result we believe there is nothing left to control anymore, except ourselves, we have turned inwards because in our consciousness is still the remains of some mysterious force that cannot be controlled. but soon we will have that under control as well. we used to be much more in awe of the forces of nature, we read into them something divine,  we spoke to them through our prayers, like we supplicated our gods. everything around us reminded us of change of the inevitability of death, of the cycles, of mutability. now everything reminds us of staticness, of inertia,,and whatever change there is it is controlled measurable calculable by man....

 the whirling dervishes gathered in the courtyard, whose perimeter was filled with spectating guests. they bowed to each other as a gesture of respect and honor. as they entered they wore black cloaks the removal of which symbolized the spiritual rebirth, their arms clasped around their upper bodies represented the number one, god's unity. they slowly begin to spin or whirl on a central axis, from right to left, around the heart, once he  starts  to whirl faster his arms open with the right arm pointed at the sky to receive god's beneficence and his left hand, where his eyes are staring, pointed down towards earth. the process of spinning in circles is a  from of active mediation in which one dissolves the ego and personal desires and focuses on god. the spinning dervishes are representative of the planets orbiting the sun. greater spiritual perfection is achieved the faster one spins , calling out the name allah, and abandoning personal identity and ego. with head t...