What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Worldly and otherworldly topics
User avatar
Mashy
Posts: 56
Joined: Mon Mar 01, 2021 8:33 am
Contact:

What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by Mashy » Wed Mar 03, 2021 6:14 am

My life changed forever once I came across the idea that power hierarchies are subverted by people trying to implement their own power hierarchies through a different set of values, that in the end all parties desire power, and they will use the best adapted method to get there.

This is an idea. Ideas are just stories, the truth value of stories are irrelevant, the only important thing is the real-world consequences in implementing these stories. And what is the consequence of me applying this idea of power hierarchies in my life? I stopped participating in the political/status game so much. No party is more moral than the other. Guess what philosopher inspired me? Ha

2) That charity (and kindness) is a power play and another way to exert power. Then it is no surprise that philanthropy is the next logical corollary to extreme power and wealth.

3) The paradox that values are both created and predetermined. The struggle for the meaning of life would not be a struggle at all if it was either a scientific question or a spiritual question. It's both.

Tags:

User avatar
Madrigal
Posts: 619
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2019 8:59 am

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by Madrigal » Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:26 pm

Mashy wrote:
Wed Mar 03, 2021 6:14 am
This is an idea. Ideas are just stories, the truth value of stories are irrelevant, the only important thing is the real-world consequences in implementing these stories. And what is the consequence of me applying this idea of power hierarchies in my life? I stopped participating in the political/status game so much. No party is more moral than the other. Guess what philosopher inspired me? Ha
Nietzsche? You could do worse, if so. :p

Perhaps the first big philosophical revelation I had was when reading Bakunin's God and the State around age 17. It drew me in because of my restless atheisim but hooked me with its libertarian views on the State. Marx later gave me another revelation in the idea of how the economy, or basically the point in the development of a society's form of labor, defines both class and conscience, and the dialectics of class consciouness as it impacts the dialectics of human development.

I think that when I was younger I always had this sense of "everything is happening right now", and at every crossroad I imagined alternative scenarios of how this dialectic would unfold, always betting on the more optimistic one. With time, you start to see your place more clearly in your small journey through history's geography. You have a better sense of when you're on a plateau, when you've reached a peak, when you're faced with hilly terrain. You look back and think of how you missed the mark, not knowing where you were standing. Thinking you'd see an upheaval when not a leaf shook in the wind. Maybe with this greater clarity I have become more pessimistic about our chances as a species, but I haven't changed my mind about what is right and necessary.

djm
Posts: 244
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2021 3:08 pm
Location: Woodplumpton
Formerly: djm

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by djm » Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:24 pm

I had read a lot of philosophy over the years, but the one that has actually had an impact on the way I see the world and live my life would be Nietzsche. I picked up a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra when I was 18, and must have re-read it 30 times now.

The passages that most influenced me are:

1. Where Zarathustra climbs a mountain but is hampered by the spirit of gravity. Zarathustra responds by introducing the concept of eternal recurrence. Put simply it encourages you to ask yourself what would you do in life if you had to live it again and again. To ignore the voices that tell you what you cant do, that you must ultimately fail. In my work I carry that concept a step forwards and like to encourage the spirit of levity or 'what if you could do anything?'.

2. Where Zarathustra observes the tightrope walker fall, and then introduces the concepts of ultimate man vs superman. Man as a bridge to something better.

Nietzsche was a marvellous mind, and gives people reason to strive to be better. I also love Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil.

The other philosophers I have taken lessons from are:

Heidegger (Being and Time), where he introduces the fluid nature of truth discussing the orgininal etymological greek root 'alethea' where truth effectively means 'revealing something new by looking from another perspective'. I do like to explore things from different angles, views and see if my opinion or understanding still holds up.

Schopenhauer. An unfashionable philosopher due to his misogyny, but a shrewd observer of life and some memorable and useful maxims that I live by.

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by Ferrus » Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:24 am

I always found, from the point of view of an interest in history, the observations of Hobbes and Machiavelli (and Thucydides if you class him as a philosopher) about the nature of power hold a lot of insight if you want to understand what makes the world work
.
Ex falso, quodlibet

djm
Posts: 244
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2021 3:08 pm
Location: Woodplumpton
Formerly: djm

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by djm » Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:21 pm

Ferrus wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:24 am
I always found, from the point of view of an interest in history, the observations of Hobbes and Machiavelli (and Thucydides if you class him as a philosopher) about the nature of power hold a lot of insight if you want to understand what makes the world work
.
if you are going to claim Thucydides (and it's a good call) I'd chuck in Herodatus as well.

I have been mulling the op over, and thought I'd add in philosophy that has had a negative impact on my life. I do wish my father had not been indoctrinated with Marxism, I might have had a better start in life otherwise.

User avatar
DJ Drug Problem
Posts: 154
Joined: Sat Feb 13, 2021 9:25 pm
Formerly: DJ Fresh Produce
Contact:

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by DJ Drug Problem » Fri Mar 05, 2021 12:21 am

The Heart Sutra and the other Prajnaparamita Sutras talk about a lot of things, but their most fundamental theme is the basic groundlessness of our experience. They say that no matter what we do, no matter what we say, and no matter what we feel, we need not believe any of it. There is nothing whatsoever to hold on to, and even that is not sure. So these sutras pull the rug out from under us all the time and take away all our favorite toys. Usually when someone takes away one of our mental toys we just find new toys. That is one of the reasons why many of the Prajnaparamita Sutras are so long—they list all the toys we can think of and even more, but our mind still keeps grasping at new ones. The basic point is to get to a place where we actually stop searching for and grasping at the next toy. Then we need to see how that state of mind feels. How does our mind feel when we are not grasping at anything, when we are not trying to entertain ourselves, and when our mind is not going outside (or not going anywhere at all), when there is no place left to go?

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Fri Mar 05, 2021 12:28 am

Camus, especially his thoughts on Sisyphus. Essentially.... if nothing actually matters, than what does really matter?

Eventually I arrived at the idea that nihilism is nothing but a dead end that makes people ridiculous in practice. It's easy to say you want to live without morality, but it's funny how in practice that it only seems to apply to other people and you expect yourself to be treated fairly and gently by others.

If all that matters is power, than why wring your hands about somebody in power doing something you dislike? Because I've definitely seen that.

Ultimately I decided I don't want to be the only thing in the universe that matters, and I had to be honest about that and accept that, and I'm happier as a result (I have other reasons, too).

User avatar
Ferrus
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2021 11:10 pm
Location: Barcelona

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by Ferrus » Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:01 am

djm wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:21 pm
Ferrus wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:24 am
I always found, from the point of view of an interest in history, the observations of Hobbes and Machiavelli (and Thucydides if you class him as a philosopher) about the nature of power hold a lot of insight if you want to understand what makes the world work
.
if you are going to claim Thucydides (and it's a good call) I'd chuck in Herodatus as well.
Yes, and now I think about it Edward Gibbon's opus magnum which is nomially about the fall of Rome but it really a huge philosophical history of ancient and medieval history of Europe and the Middle East had a great effect upon what I read and have been interested in and the style of writing I enjoy.

On a personal level, I would also add the skepticism and atheism of the writings of David Hume (and his probabilistic empiricism) and the philosophical novels of Voltaire were influential on me coming from a semi-religious family.

From an example of rigourous thinking I also have always admired Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, some of the details are wrong but the core analysis of conscious experience is excellent, which is an example of how to think deeply and methodolically about a difficuly subject.

More on the bounds of mathematics but Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers" which I read alongside Charles Pretzold's commentary turned out to be quite a deep theory about abstract computation, logic and the limits thereof, which again adds an element of interest or mystery.

Also Aristotle, in terms of his maxim that the highest aim of a human is philosophy - by which in his time he meant anyone engaged im the furtherance of human knowledge rigorously - gave a sense of meaning to my life.
Ex falso, quodlibet

User avatar
C.J.Woolf
Posts: 79
Joined: Mon Mar 01, 2021 1:30 am

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by C.J.Woolf » Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:54 pm

1. Sartre's "Man is condemned to be free", and existentialist philosophy in general. The idea that life has no purpose or meaning except for what we give it.

2. An idea in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha: Sometimes you only find what you're looking for after you stop trying so damn hard to find it.

User avatar
last_caress
Posts: 60
Joined: Sat Feb 27, 2021 8:45 pm

Re: What are some philosophical ideas that have had a profound impact on your life? Why?

Post by last_caress » Fri Mar 05, 2021 4:38 pm

Absurdism. It gave name to the existential conclusion I had arrived at and reinforced not wasting undue time with a search for ultimate meaning and the silly fictions invented to fill that void.

Post Reply