The problem facing all seekers of knowledge is this: How can we discover truths that are in no way beneficial or useful to us? (We may call this the pragmatist challenge.) It seems to follow from my own theory that humans can only perceive that which is useful to them. If this is true, how will the seeker of knowledge ever discover objective truths, i.e. truths that do not in any way relate to the seeker's interests? Of course, this commits the error of thinking that what benefits us cannot at the same time, fortuitously, be an objective truth. But even if we lay this version of the challenge aside, it still remains the case that truths that lie outside the realm of human interests will also remain outside our grasp.
The solution to this problem probably constitutes one of the most ingenious inventions in the history of humankind, one that may even rival the invention of knowing itself. (The reference is to Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, in which he talks about humans as the "clever beasts [who] invented knowing.")
Many have questioned the usefulness of this project.
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I'm better than you
In order to part with something valuable, you must get paid for it. This something may not only be a tradable good in the traditional sense, but also an idea, your free time, etc. If I spend my time memorizing the whole of the Iliad, I must in some way be compensated for my efforts. This is simply human nature, and you cannot get around it.
Now some governments attempt to solve financial crises by printing more money. Some individuals attempt to solve their personal financial crises by printing counterfeit money. Although when done by individuals this move is considered illegal, whereas when done by governments it is considered legal, it is essentially the same idea. So suppose an ancient philosopher-mathematician discovers some truth, say, of geometry. Now, however, he demands his reward. It is nowhere to be found: sex and riches and comfort and goods do not automatically flow to him who has discovered some truth. But if the philosopher has not been rewarded, how can he keep discovering truths? What's in it for him?
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Here, then, enters this ingenious invention I talked about earlier: In order to be able to "purchase" many truths, philosophers have invented a kind of counterfeit coin with which they pay themselves, and they called it superiority. (I'm imagining all ancient seekers of knowledge to have been philosophers.) In this way they learned many truths—which is to say they abandoned many illusions—and what they got in return was the feeling of superiority. They gave something away (time; effort; bliss; etc.), and they got something in return (the feeling of superiority). Their superiority, however, was their own invention, and it remained something of a counterfeit, for it was only acknowledged as valid either by themselves or a small group of like-minded individuals.
Spiritual Superiority as an inferior coin
People customarily invent illusions in order to cope with life. Priests, for instance, may be said to have invented the concept of spiritual superiority, where all their meaningless activities in the monasteries are suffered because they are believed to purchase them a place in heaven. People in general have been fashioning illusions since time immemorial. Then how is this discovery of the seekers of knowledge that I mentioned above innovative? The answer will be made clear if we imagine a common man seeking knowledge. In exchange for truth A he invents some illusion B' that will help him cope with A. In exchange for truth B he invents illusion A'. In exchange for truth C he invents illusion D'. In exchange for truth D he invents illusion D'—well, one easily loses track. Asked which of his beliefs are truths and which are illusions, the common man will be at a loss to answer. The originality of the seeker of knowledge lies in his exchanging all illusions for one: that of superiority. At any given point, the seeker of knowledge knows that everything he believes is true, except for his belief in his own superiority. (He may say this, but of course he never genuinely doubts his superiority.) That way he can keep track of his lies. And, most importantly, other people know this too, so they can always trust the seeker of knowledge. That is how the philosopher has surpassed the priest. No one can make any headway in the realm of truth without inventing lies: and the philosopher has invented the greatest of them all, because it is the most harmless one and the most persistent.
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Superiority is not Intelligence
Superiority of course is often confused with intelligence, but the terms are not interchangeable. The atheist philosopher will readily admit that there are theologians who are very intelligent, perhaps even more intelligent than himself—but he will still believe himself to be superior even in those cases where he is less intelligent than the theologian. The same applies for moral standing, etc. No single trait can be identified with superiority. The term is thus ideally vague, lest anyone tries to question it.
The danger facing all Intellectual Progress
If you demanded a practical gain for every truth learned, you would not get very far. Even the truths of science only rarely have instantaneous practical application, and even when they have a future-application the application can rarely be foreseen at or before the moment of discovery. At or before the moment of discovery, you simply marvel at the possibility or fact of the discovery itself—which is to say that you marvel at your superiority, at the respect and admiration and accolades fellow scientists will grant you, at the prospect that you may win a Nobel prize, etc. So you would not get very far in your quest for truth if you demanded a real practical reward for every intellectual victory attained. So you invent a fake coin—the one I here call superiority—with which you reward yourself for every intellectual achievement, no matter how puny and practically ineffectual. You have thus outwitted Nature herself.
From this, however, it follows that the people or attitudes that are most dangerous to intellectual progress are the ones that question the superiority of the seekers of truth (philosophers, scientists, etc.). Many do not realize that the whole edifice of modern science and thought stands on the intellectuals' belief in their superiority (how else are they to fuel such meaningless endeavors?) If society prizes the achievements of science and thought, they will do well to grant the seeker of knowledge this one premise. Some practical reward will also go a long way toward enlivening the knowledge-seeker's enterprise.
We can't burst the ego-bubble without bringing down the whole intellectual edifice.
Not to be misunderstood
There remains some room for misunderstanding. When I refer to the belief in superiority as an illusion, I mean that in a very particular sense. I mean it in the same sense that the government declares the counterfeiter's money to be counterfeit. A person may not simply decide to invent a currency that only he himself recognizes, and claim that it has any real value. Similarly, superiority is a very flimsy concept when it goes unrecognized by the majority of the people. Even those who recognize it would probably not make any sacrifices (in a hypothetical scenario) for a genius whose status they do acknowledge, so the recognition becomes flimsier still—a recognition in word rather than in deed, rather similar to the recognition the English grant their Queen.
In general, the belief in superiority is an illusion because it shares many similarities with the illusions that inhabit many people's private mythology—their inaccessibility, lack of authority, the fact that they are seldom shared publicly, the fact that comparable beliefs are present in every person, which is to say that the particular belief of every person is contradicted by the belief of every other person, etc. It is, secondly, an illusion for the reason that it is meant to be an answer to the question How can we discover truths that are in no way beneficial or useful to us? The answer is, By inventing something that has no real practical significance, but which is thought to have one. That is, by inventing superiority. One may reply by saying that the belief in superiority does have practical benefits, for it helps a person live, since without it he would surely perish. However, this belief was only required in the first place in order to justify the tremendous expense that is the seeking of knowledge—if one really cared about one's survival, one would simply not have sought knowledge! (Knowledge, that is, that has no practical benefit.)
Summary
- Although all pleasant activities are capable of self-justification, nothing that is painful may justify itself.
- Because knowledge is not always pleasant, it cannot always justify itself, and must reach outwards.
- But knowledge sometimes has no beneficial practical effect (i.e. it cannot reach outwards).
- Therefore, in those cases, we must invent such a beneficial practical effect.—Such an invention has indeed taken place: it is the self-fueling belief in one's superiority.
Curtain
Here I tried to delve a little bit into a kind of just-so psychology about how people may have circumnavigated the theory of use in order to allow for more sustained and "useless" action.
This completes the 15th installment of the Meaning of Life series. In case you missed the other episodes:
Part 14: Wasted Beauty!
Part 13: The Survival Instinct - Does it Exist?
Part 12: What's the Use?
Part 11: Words VS Actions
Part 10: Mothers and Egos!
Part 9: Can People Share Ownership of the Same Body?
Part 8: Against Subjectivism - Is Everything Relative?
Part 7: The Value-Laden View of Life
Part 6: I Am Therefore I Harm
Part 5: Nietzsche vs Christianity: Are Christians Nihilists?
Part 4: Can we desire death?
Part 3: Are nihilists being honest when they say life has no value?
Part 2: Does death make life meaningless?
Part 1: Is it possible to be a nihilist?
I'll see you in the next episode, where I will continue exploring my theory of Use, one of the three theories in the book that explain how life may appear meaningful or meaningless to us. Specifically, in the next episode, I will ask how the theory of use might help us define the genius.
Come join us on Discord! https://discord.gg/7qyarFD
Again, not your theory. This is a teleological fallacy much like humans believing that everything around them exists because of them. We cannot perceive gamma rays yet they are useful to us because we have discovered them through an intermediate tool. Based on your logic you can actually imply that anything that can be perceived can have a use. Again. bullshit philosophy. TELEOLOGY.
and
NOT. YOUR. THEORY. ..just because you call bullshit rhetorics "your theory" it doesn't mean they are.
As for the "invention of superiority". Yet again. Bullshit rhetorics. You tried to mimic Ernest Becker's narrative about humans being immortality projects yet it doesn't touch the essence because really you can call anything "the most important invention" and still be valid. Anything can be reasoned as such.
The aspect of expressing superiority exists in every living organism and does not need to be "invented". It is bounded to survival instincts and trying to prevail upon one another.
(again another bullshit post, a desperate attempt to prove that survival instincts do not exist. You reached a point to even call superiority...an invention (FFS) just to go contra against survival instincts...
..idiotic as fuck. new low).
Please reply to this comment if you accept or decline.
Accept!
Child labour - the mounting pains of delivery. It's a painful, justifiable experience.
With a very tangible practical result: extra farm-hands.
According to your definition:
Beyond that though. Is the "self-fueling belief" in one's superiority (or any aspect, imagined or real) really justifiable outside the realm of the self? You may very well prove it to yourself, but how can you impose that task on another who cannot, practically, possess the tools to do so?
You are asking people to invent a belief in your superiority first. That is going to require some convincing from your part (payment, as you say) but you would be tricking them into investing onto something which cannot be inwardly proved. You would be selling them an illusion at best.
Unless we can safely argue that everything is an illusion, and if we are indeed to sell something, it might as well be a true truth (if that is ever possible). This should be any philosopher's ultimate humanly aim.
On a brighter note. Your theory could very much fly. Consider the creation of yet another cryptocurrency iteration, SupaSpecie (abbreviated SS, hereby patented and blockchained). If humans are so prone in bying into illusions, they will definitely want to use this one too!
Thank you for this brilliant opportunity for discource!
Yeah I was thinking of this idea of everyone having their own crypto coin while writing this!
The belief in one's own superiority is often tied to external outcomes by the individual himself. This is why artists struggle instead of feeling indifferent toward people's indifference. The reason is because, if you believe you're objectively right, then there's an objective "ought to" hiding in your belief. To be more concrete, the person who believes in his own let's say artistic superiority cannot, I think, believe in the following two statements at the same time: (a) I am a superior artist to person X (b) X ought to have greater artistic success than I, all things being equal. I think there's a contradiction hiding there somewhere, though there's no immediately evident logical fallacy there, and I think in this and similar ways our subjective beliefs get tied to the external world, and we begin to attempt and to struggle to externalize our inner convictions.
Thanks for the comment!
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Actually, I would counter your proposition regarding "superiority" as an invention, with more general "self-delusion" as being the most important, fundamental human invention. Human society could be argued as a form of mass, collective delusion, in which the immaterial becomes material.
The concept of money, for instance, is a prime example of this collective human delusion. The value of money derives from man's belief (or faith) in the legitimacy of the medium upon which his society chose to assign certain object as the medium of exchange. The only value of "money" derives from belief (or faith).
Mathematics is another form of delusion accepted as "true" on the will if faith alone. Reality does not divide itself into mathematical equations; the human mind imposes mathematical rules upon reality, by dividing the external world into comprehenaible divisions. An honest mathematician will recognize that his career is simply an engagement with fictitious universe of man's imagination.
Faith may be the ultimate "invention" of humanity that materializes the creature we consider "human." Without faith, man ultimately is reduced to a bag of self-replicating chemicals with equal value to the mud upon which he tramples.
True. The ingeniousness of the invention (or just the thought experiment) is that if you delude yourself, you get confused. What's real? What's not? But if you lay all other delusions aside, exchanging it for the one single delusion of superiority - you may even proud yourself on being a superior human being because you are delusion-free - then, problem solved! You can get very far by exchanging all delusions for the one of superiority (which, like I say in the post, may not be a delusion at all). If you read philosophers or even scientists of the past, let's say anthropologists of the past, how lowly they spoke of indigenous peoples compared to PC anthropologists of today, if you read Schopenhauer or Nietzsche and see how "pompously" (but completely justifiably, in my opinion) they wrote about themselves, then you'll easily understand how this invention can be very handy. "For every two pages of truth, I'll write a sentence complimenting myself on its discovery." That's a pretty good deal, especially considering that no one is forced to acknowledge their superiority, or pay them any money, so there's a lot more left to spend on inane entertainment that will make people like Bieber and Beckham filthy rich, cos knowledge-seekers are self-fueling. (Maybe - maybe they should organize a strike?)
True. Many a times a theist will say to me, "but we believe in all sorts of things, why pick on God specifically?", and I often reply saying that the God delusion is harmful because it's shared. A bunch of crazy people, each with their own delusion, won't do much harm. But here you give an example of a shared delusion that does actually produce harm, because it's a mass delusion. (You don't have to agree with my atheism btw to agree that delusions are mainly harmful when they are shared).
This is more complicated than your other points. Mathematics may indeed not be a truth with a capital T because it imposes a fixed structure on a fluid world. Same can be said of many of our language concepts. But this specific "delusion" can be mapped onto reality with high statistical accuracy and lead to beneficial practical results. It's how engineers even today use Newton's equations even though they've been replaced by Einstein's, because Newton's math is simpler and it does the job equally well.
I see what you're saying. William James had a lot to say about the value of faith, and if you haven't studied him I think you'd like him. I would say that we indeed believe in a lot of falsehoods to get us through the day, but some falsehoods have outlived their usefulness. We should endeavor to believe in as many truths as we can, and as few lies as we can, while at the same time evolving ourselves (with the aid of technology, most probably) to make ourselves into the kinds of beings that can handle truths without imploding.
I'll also just add that the post is a kind of thought-experiment, a "what if", an interesting idea, rather than a historical claim about what actually happened. Like I said, a just-so story.
How true a statement! Many medical professionals view PTSD as combat related trauma, but fail to consider that the dysfunction of the decommissioned soldier may be more due to his inability to adapt to the civilian societal delusions. Modern Western man lives in a bubble of self-assured security and safety, never considering that the edifice of mass delusion upon which he has built his life is as tenuous as the shifting sand at the beach. The combat veterans, having experienced the ease with which a society degenerates into chaos, recognizes the farce upon which their "civilian" life is to be built. This mental rejection of societal delusion is labeled as "mental illness" and tranquilizers are used to silence non-conformers, lest the entire edifice of social organization falls apart. War and peace are separated by but a camera angle of the mass media. Plato may have been one of the first intellectuals to rebel against this mass delusion we call "society" by elucidating his observation that polis is built upon a Noble Lie.
Perhaps the conceptual matrix that enable man to believe that he can discover truth itself is a delusion. The famous philosophical debate between Bohr and Heisenberg regarding the limits of discovery seems apt here. Is Bohr correct in his faith that man will eventually know all aspects of his external environment with improved tools, or is Heisenberg correct in his faith that there are limits to discovery? At the core of this "scientific" debate lies personal faith in his belief of the universe - religion - regarding its nature.
"Theists" or "atheists" are mislabels and does not serve to identify core values each hold. Are "atheists" merely against theism, or do they hold some other coherent belief system? Do all "theists" share the same belief system regarding the nature of the universe? In the end, all men follow their reason, experience, and revelations from God (or universe, if you will) and leap unto their conclusions, which they term "religion" or "philosophy."
How true, and how well you put it! Soldiers have glimpsed the truth among the Morlocks, and now they return to a world of carefree happy-go-lucky Eloi. As I'll put it later in this series, the soldiers saw that their values are contingently supported by the world, not necessarily. The civilians still live in a delusion of pampered contingent affirmation of their values that they interpret as necessity, as though their values were one with some imagined inviolable "moral fabric" of the universe.
I guess we'll find out! And if any of them is right, we'll have at least one objective truth!
Yeah they all come in different shapes and sizes and flavors, atheists and agnostics and theists too. When I refer to God or religion I usually just mean the traditional conception. If you ask most Christian believers, "is God omnipotent/omnibenevolent/all-knowing/creator of all?" etc., usually you'll get the same answers. I doubt you'll find many who'll say "well, ya know, if you try really hard at school, there's no reason you can't know more than God", or "He's strong, don't get me wrong, but have you seen the muscles on that guy? I bet he could take on God real easy". Etc. People like to be subjectivists about this sometimes, but I believe some core traits of God are agreed on by most believers.
Nature of God has been in debate not only between Christian and non-Christian, but also intra-Christian factions. From the beginning of the Christian sect, they divided themselves between the "Judiazers" and "Hellenizers" relating to the nature of their Messiah. Then the infinite variations of Christianity follows: Arians vs. Niceans, Nestorian vs Ephisian, Coptic vs. Chalcedonian, Catholic vs. Orthodox. The division between Western and Eastern Christianity must also be mentioned, with the West's penchant for legalistic doctrines vs. East's penchant for revelatory dogmas.
Of course, the so-called Reformation unleashed infinite factions baying for each others' blood over the nature of their one god - lower Protestantism can't be termed triune god worshippers as their theology is but a garbage dump of rejected ideas. I don't know much about the Old World, but here in the US, many "Christians" believe that Jesus was a 'Murican who established his church in Texas and gave us the King James' Bible.
And isn't all that a kind of (maybe weak) argument against God's existence, seeing how it's rather obvious from all this that it's men creating God rather than the other way around?
:-). I like the way you challenge theists to refine their world-view. What is the nature of man? As with the nature of God, it seems that the definition regarding the nature of man also has infinite variations. Some, our "he shall not be named" (maybe anomen?), posit that man is just a meat-bag of chemicals, dancing to the drumbeat of instinct; others, like Dawkins, believe that man is a meat-bag of chemicals, gifted with the ability to transcend his instinct; others, like Plato, thought that man is amalgamation of meat and soul, and the soul defines man; Descartes considered that the nature of man is circumscribed to only his thoughts, as nothing in reality is certain. Do all these varied perspectives regarding the nature of man negate that man has a nature, or is man also but an illusion?
Wow, Amazing! Will be looking forward to see new content!!!
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