Well, I want this to be my very last post at reddit. I'm not an english native speaker, so it may not be quite precise on the language. But let's try.

I'm posting it here because I consider it as related to philosophy, but it's also me venting something. So, either because it doesn't get considered as philosophy or because it gets too boring, it may be deleted.

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I studied a lot of different subjects, and it showed me many relations I never thought it could be possible. The Metaphysics also showed itself as the meta-thought, that is, there is the chaotic information on a subject, but then you may create categories on it. The more you think about these categories themselves, the more the thought jumps from the particular topic to a general way to think about ordering. This metathought, that is the thought about the thought, opens the door to the sense of Metaphysics.

Anyway, by doing these studies, I actually got pretty much depressed. I mean, a lot. I summarize this experience like this: one thing is to get to know the evil (the imperfect, the ugly or whatever). It's easy to see, and easy to imagine. The more you know evil, the less you believe there is good, and whatever shows as good seems to you like something disgusting, because you end up believing intuitively there's an imperfection hid somewhere. The other way, though, hurts more: if you get to know good, the more you try to get to know higher goodness, the more you realize the lack of it around. Notice this: one thing is evil, the other thing is lack of good. They are, let's say, the same "gap of goodness", but the first way you see it as expected or disgusting; the second way you see it as what it could be of good. And that hurts much more. The more you train this vision, the more you start to see how the world could be of good, and realize it is not that. Evil doesn't matter, but the lack of goodness is saddening. It is Tristesse, like Chopin expressed it.

So, I went through this path and from my experience I tell you guys: Plato said evil is the lack of knowledge, and it seems he's pretty much right. Knowledge has a theleology: any knowledge can be used to direct an intelligence to understand itself. In the center of intelligence, the mechanism that makes it work, there's Good. But I won't prove it here, since this is my last post ever, or so I hope. For anyone who wants to investigate it, try paying attention to your insight: when it happens, how it happens, what it brings, what it is related to, how does this relation builds the insight content and so on.

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Anyway, I consider today as the end of my journey. I found out something that is my limit. I call it (for now) "the map of learning".

I studied my culture and the public education of my country as much as I could, and it led me to realize some lacks, great lacks. It's not quite the fault of anyone, it just happened that no'one seems to have thought about these ideas (according what it can be read through the main educational discussion). And I'm no'one, I shouldn't even have investigated none of what I did. I was supposed to be a worker and nothing else, but my curiosity led me to some weird tracks. And now is the time to head back to the main path.

So, anyway, this map is about the problems of learning. I already had made a "map" on how many of cultural works end up being close to useless because the author wasn't really sincere about it. Now, even though the person is sincere, still there may be some errors.

I mean, imagine when you try to learn a language. You can either:

I) Learn it by a course (a formal list or order)

II) Learn it by yourself (chaotic)

I knew too many people who passed through courses and didn't learn almost anything. But chaotic learning also mostly doesn't work. The idea of today was to organize my experience on this. This is kinda Lao-Zi's search of Tao. Well, by the end, I found out some things really sad. And that was the final blow. I'm officially depressed lol

So, well... I know it's not written entirely, nor explained and so on, but I just needed to share this somewhere. And that's all. I got bored of all of this search for knowledge. I want to do my destiny, which is to be a hard worker. I wasn't supposed to be here, I wasn't invited to the symposium, I got here by accident and feel very ashamed for trying to usurp a place I wasn't supposed to be in.

So, I didn't appear very much here, but I've read posts here and comments, and I'd like to thank you guys for them.

And also I'd like to thank for all the reddit. This is really a great place. I like this structure, which is close to old forums. Facebook and specially Instagram don't have enough space for a real discussion.

Thank you for reading this venting.

So apparently there's a limit for the size of the answer. I'm tired of writing, you may die tired of reading. I also lost the bold I use to emphasize some things, so this may be even worst. Anyhow, since we're here, I'll post it as this online notepad.

https://www.invertexto.com/dialecticofeternity

Yes. So, even animals can think and measure. Actually, to a certain point, even plants do. But they can't perceive they're perceiving. That skill is the center of human intelligence. This is where words (and symbols) come from. And from words, all cultures, including sciences.

But I usually divide the perception of perception in 4 skills. One is this skill itself, which we call getting counscious about something, an object or an idea. Then there's 3 things you can do after it (actually more, but 3 major): analogy, go up and go down. We do these 4 things naturally, because, well, it's inherited in our culture. But the more conscious about them, the more intelligence.

Analogy means getting that information and relating to others; go down means getting the information and thinking it in details; go up means realizing that information as part of a set. That's Plato basically.

When a writer or a musician gets a motif to compose, it's going down. When someone sees a bunch of phenomena and realizes a pattern, he's going up. When someone points the direction to get to a place, or when you see someone telling an experience and you sympathize with it, or when you're reading a metaphor or story and apply it to another situation, you're doing analogy.

That was basic lunch for the biggest writers. Dante's treatises on Convivio talk about it. Also Plato's dialogues are that all the time. But we lost the track of this broader meaning of culture, and focused only on scientific production, which is basically only go down. We're not creating new objects (going up), just applying the methodology to new cases (it could be analogy, but mostly just going down).

Thanks for answering. I didn't know about Siemens. I'll answer you part by part, but don't take it personally. If you still enjoy the discussion, we may go further.

>I don’t believe you will have an exact map of unity from your collection; it’s naive optimism. Perhaps a child’s rendition of a map.

That's actually the weirdest part of knowledge itself. Just like every science, although we don't have the full version of the knowledge, as we point to describe a reality, it becomes "truth enough". Euclides, for instance, didn't have the whole map, but those apriori objects (I call them mental objects), once the mind notice it, becomes a thing on its own.

For instance, we have the unity of an author. I can read all the works of, say, Dostoevsky, and, if I don't try to imagine there's a unity there, the pieces won't show up, even though there is one. If, though, I bet on this position, for each line I read my mind is also looking for broader connections. This decision of attention changes everything. It doesn't matter if it isn't perfect, it points to a reality (or this mental object, if you'd rather).

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>There was a old ambition in scholastic monasteries that one single person could become master of all the studies: Theology, Philosophy (though it technically just theological tools at this point), Law, Medicine, etc.

I don't know if this is quite the truth, though, but if you could show me examples, I'd love to read about. I know about the Enciclopedias, like Isidore of Seville, but after scholastic there were still Diderot and Hegel's encyclopedias. But what was regular back then, though, was the study of the 7 Liberal Arts, that is language, math and physics, the "trivial" arts of natural reason. I have this theory that the institution of liberal arts, Mortimer Adler's Great Ideas Project, Aristotle's Lyceum and Plato's Academy actually had one same principle, that is to provide an image of the "wholiness" (and how knowledge was produced at the time, the state of the art). You don't have to know everything in order to foresee and learn to deal with the fact that all the laws all the sciences study actually points to the reality, which works with the perfect version of such laws simultaneously. Knowledge is just a way to grasp some partial understanding of it in order to improve life (including curiosity).

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>When the enlightenment finally came knocking on their big oak doors, that ambition faltered, because their finely interweaved premises and conclusions were - strand by strand - proven to be incorrect, and the whole web eventually just collapsed.

I'd like an example.

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>You risk the chance of creating a fantasy map pointing to the locations of apparent trolls under bridges and dragons in caves; you risk being shown up when the map’s constituents, and their relation to one another, are proven to be inadequate or totally wrong.

I don't think that's a possibility, but I will take that in consideration. I don't think that can happen because it's not like I'm trying to understand everything and create a super final science which is bigger than everything else and puts every knowledge on it. Knowing one single science completely is impossible, since the documents produce are way more that what takes a human life. Let alone all sciences, let alone all the ones that don't exist and may exist, for instance, in 1000 years. But there are 2 points:

1- There is one "apriori object" that only appears once you try to catch unities. I call it "intelligence", but I don't quite know how to call it. It's actually the principle that is in common with what I said 2 topics above. Dante's divine comedy, for example, or Goethe's Faust is actually about that. Also sufism, which is inspired by Plato. The cosmos back then was used as an image to express how to acquire this skill to deal with unities, that is, intelligence. So Dante's work express it, either by showing the ascension in the planets (Paradise) and by showing how intelligence can be broken by our heart, that is, our sins are what makes us afraid of actually being honest with the knowledge we really have. For example, we use general phrases and ideas all the time "knowledge is x", "you are y", "John is a z person", "this country sucks", "the chinese culture is a", "men are stupid". Language can't grasp singularities, it's way, way general. To grasp the "ratio", the relation between the general and the singularity, you have to be bold to break all your past impressions and test the object as it shows, then reason it over and over again. If you have a grudge against something, you won't be able to do that. Those are, in traditional language, the effect of our sins. If you believed someone you love betrayed you, your anger won't let truth speaks even if the truth is the betrayal didn't happen (that's Otelo from Shakespeare).

2- These sciences do are connected. So the new scientific objects are born from this fact. Once you grasp this "unity of knowledge", it is possible to think with way more freedom, because you can literally create small "apriori objects" to gather new evidence for what you need. There's a great advantage on that.

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>Secondly, study Siemens connectiveness theory of learning which “emphasises the idea that knowledge is a series of interrelated webs from not only social interactions, but experiences, digital observations (commercials, websites), or even organizations. In the end, the interconnectedness of all of the knowledge leads to learning.”

I admit that, from my experience, I don't trust very much about the topic when it's spoken by a scientist. Because the training to be a scientist means focusing way too much on a object. That makes our intelligence generalize not only the object (like physicists who think everything is physics, or linguists who think everyting is language) but also the understanding through specialities, but not through wholes. (EDIT: which usually means speaking of interdisciplinarity, which is compounding a new object rather than trying to foresee the set of knowledge as the object itself). The regular folk, not-scientific, that is, the religious thought, tends to do the opposite. Although one without the other becomes easily wholiness stupidity, or speak through metaphors and applying them to facts that don't fit, the opposit becomes easily lack of comprehension, and in my country that created in humanistic sciences a great crisis. They want to transform a society that don't understand instead of understanding it and helping it to be better what it wants to be.

But I do am very thankful for your reference. I read some about it before answering, but I'll add it to my files to investigate.

I'd like to post here a meditation I've been doing.

I participate on a study circle online for about 8 years, and it always bothered me how there are people there who know the circle and study with it for about 20 years and , yet, they seem like didn't understand what is the main point here and how the other points relate to the main. This difference actually became the study topic that I got more interested about. I tried many hypothesis, about lack of knowledge, lack of culture, about luckiness, love, about amount of free time, accumulated hate, or envy, or boringness, about vocation, even castes (this idea really bothers me, though, something like predestination on the capacity of understanding).

Then today it appeared to me one that I'm posting here because it showed me something about philosophy itself.

My memory is pretty bad, so since I don't trust it, and I'm damn curious, I save data on my computer or phone. I photograph things, and I got really full of files, then I have to organize it in folders so that I may recall it when I need in the future. Well, that's a primary form of categorizational thought (like, in the most developed way, Aristotle's work and Plato's technique).

Then I realized that this may be it. I mean, since I collect a lot of data and try to categorize them, eventually I have a map of how things are conected together. Like on the study circle I'm into. There are a lot of groups, I look for all of them, and then I got a sense of the story of the place, how the pieces fit together, who is who, who is smarter, at what point, how his/her point relates to the work of the teacher we follow, and so on. That gives consciouscness of "whole", of "unity", plus the parts I have documented, even though I did it without really planning to get this result.

I also do it about college and so on. In my country the best colleges are public, so "free" (you know, "free enough"). So I actually frequented undergraduate classes from different courses, got acquaintance with researchers, and once again, documented all of that, just because my memory was pretty shitty. As a result, and that's the point I wanna get as for a contribution to the community, this gives a sense of "whole" also on the production of knowledge.

Of course I don't have more knowledge than any of the researchers, but at the same time this gives me the skill to have a sense of unity of how the knowledge is produced and spread on society. That is something by itself, and I'm starting to think that this is actually what could be called philosophy in the classical sense.

I mean, philosophy nowadays is also an academic practice, so this means the subjects studied are based on a curriculum. But this curriculum itself, let alone the rest of the curriculum or the relation of these knowledges to society, isn't the topic! So it creates a difference between philosophy as a college grade and philosophy in the classical sense.

I don't know how to develop this thought further. Just found it interesting and decided to share. If someone would like to share views about it, I'd be glad to read.

I still haven't read existentialism, except for Louis Lavelle, which is not very famous, but has a great philosophy. So, I think I'd say yes to the question.

E.g.1: there has to have formal, fixed rules of Nature, or else no science would ever evolve from one generation to another. We found Newton didn't have the complete equations, although they still work within a certain scope. But the fact we could change it to Einstein and Planck's model means the real laws themselves are fixed. (although they're most likely not Newton's, nor Einstein or Planck's, and maybe we never even get the complete version of it, but the fact our laws predict true events means they both shows the true laws exist and points to them).

E.g.2: The same way, each male has a lot of common features. If it wasn't so, you couldn't use the knowledge of one man to another, so each man you meet would be the first and only one, and that would be like every person speaking a language on their own, completely unrelated one another, thus incommunicable. That's literally impossible. Even more: what we know about a man we can apply, to a certain degree, to a woman. Because in a more general way, both are human beings. You can expand this and basically say that the same possibility of analogy and metaphor human mind can do proves the fact that everything is connected in this "more abstract category" which we call the Being. (Being is basically a word to call the most abstract aspect of an object, which everything necessarily has in itself. So there's me, I'm a man, that is a human being, that is an animal, that is living thing, that is an existence, that is a being: each category gets more abstract; we may think about it in another terms or more terms, but Being is the most abstract nonetheless).

So there's essence, which is this structural aspect, and each thing grabs a lot from each of these categories, from the being to itself. The point of the self, though, is the existence. We may say it doesn't change the essence, because a human man can't do what is inherently impossible to it. But we can do things that are unlikely. For instance, a man can decide he is a woman, and then change many of its atributes. He may look a lot like a woman, but it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that in reality he is a man who opened such possibilities, which weren't very common before 20th century. Because of that we may try to say "existence changes essence", but it isn't true. We may even accept as a woman, in existence/phenomenical world, but it can only be so because man and woman are both from a very close structure. If a man, though, for a different reason would try to truly identify with something else, whatever it is, that would be much harder, though.

man does create meaning from nothing, that's basically one of mind's basic skills. A kid can get a corn cob and play with it like it was a doll, or put wheels on it and make it a car.

But if the point you ask is as to whether this meaning was invented or it existed in reality, well, that's both. Every science is a human invention, and yet it has real objects as its basis. So what it tells points to the real object, thus it's true, once decodified in facts. That is the same as for meaning itself. We may phrase it like that: we can't see the meaning of things as the Omniscient could, in a perfect way, in perfect categories, but we we can see meaning through our imagination. We create it, yet it exists as a possibility of the things.

I'm not sure if this is clear, but I hope it's understandable.