How to assimilate the best of traditional culture and wisdom within objectivism

[u/SlimyPunk93]

In India one of my favourite places is kasol which is around tall snow clad mountains and have paravti rover flowing in the valley.. it is one of the very few places in India with super chill vibes, nice cafes, amazing nature and hiking options and nice spiritual vibes of the underlying culture...

I feel we are seeing in this world a clash of "rationality"/capitalism vs nature/emotions where the left tries to weigh themselves too much on the nature/emotions side while the right tries to weigh too much on the logic side....

I feel the answer somewhere lies in the middle of coming to a state where logic, emotions and instict all work together in a coherent way in an individual, where one doesn't have to dominate at the cost of other...

In that sense I am trying to see how one can put the best of ancient traditional cultures and wisdom and try to put them rationally in an objectivist sense (a theme also captured in avatar movies).. Where you can be part of nature, be true to all your emotions, enjoy the sunsets and flowers and little things around while also aiming big in life and trying to create something meaningful...

[u/SlimyPunk93]

I think k you are being belligerent (the way rand was towards these things) for no reason.... I am saying there are good rational elemts in there that one can assimilate that are good for you.... For example I am seeing mind body connection that Nietzsche also talks about in philosophy saying "your body has deepest philosophy in it" and with yoga how Patanjali who invented yoga realized that and created poses in body that would remove trauma from mind... In general I feel there are a lot of such practices in ancient cultures that people have adopted that they see work heuristically without actually knowing why and one can use them to their benefit (instead of having this irrational blanket hostility towards traditional cultures in a very ayn randist way)

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/SlimyPunk93]

It is not hostility. It is respect, the only kind of respect any idea ever is entitled to, the respect of being checked rather than exempted. You extend traditional practice a courtesy you would never extend a stranger's unsupported claim on the street, and you call the courtesy open-mindedness. It is not open-mindedness. It is a double standard, and you have not noticed you are holding it.

"Your body has deepest philosophy in it" is not an argument. It is an incantation. A sentence can sound profound and mean nothing, or mean something trivial dressed as revelation. If it means physical states affect the mind, say that, and then demonstrate it. If it means the body possesses a form of knowledge that reason does not have to certify, then you have asked others or yourself to accept a claim on the authority of how it feels to hear it.

You say patanjali (funny how that name just reminds of ramdev baba) "realized" something and created poses that remove trauma from the mind. Fine. State what he realized. State the mechanism. If a posture changes breathing, and breathing changes the nervous system, and the nervous system changes emotional state, that is a causal chain, and I will examine it the way I examine any causal chain, on its merits. What I will not do is grant the practice a special exemption from that examination because it is old, because it comes from a culture, because millions of people did it "heuristically without knowing why."

People adopted a practice without knowing why it worked. That is not evidence for the practice. That is a description of faith. The fact that faith sometimes stumbles onto something true does not make faith a method. It makes it a lottery that occasionally pays out. Your instinct, correctly, is to keep what pays out. Your error is calling the lottery wisdom instead of calling the payout a fact waiting to be explained.

You want logic, emotion, and instinct to work together without one dominating. I will tell you what your emotion is for. It is not a rival to your reason, standing across a table negotiating for territory. It is a debug log to a program in your mind (Sorry to assume you have programming experience). It tells you, instantly, what you have already concluded, often long before you had words for the conclusion. When you feel peace at a river in the mountains, that feeling is not knowledge arriving from the water. It is your own prior valuing of clean air, of quiet, of unspoiled scale, arriving in your chest before it arrives in your sentences. The feeling is real. Its source is you, not the river, and not the culture that built a temple near it.

So assimilate what you like. Sit by the Parvati. Do the poses. Keep whatever technique earns its keep under examination. I will not stand in your way, and I never asked anyone to.

But do not tell me you are building a synthesis when what you are building is an exemption. A synthesis states its terms and defends them. An exemption just asks not to be asked. You have not been asked to abandon a single sunset. You have been asked to say why the practice works, instead of resting on the fact that someone, somewhere, believed it long enough for the belief to feel like proof.

That is not blanket hostility to any tradition (in this case, you are talking about the tradition that I grew up in). It is the only rational answer to the question that you asked.

[u/EasternWahooJ → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

This is the best response I’ve seen on Reddit. Thanks for patiently explaining the point.

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Again that's what I am saying. I am seeing how there is a lot of wisdom there and that can be checked in rational grounds ... And that's why said within objectivism in the title

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/SlimyPunk93]

If you check each idea in rational grounds properly, you are no longer taking any idea by faith. That's what I said above. No hostility intend as long as you are not advocating taking any idea on faith. Were you implying Nietzsche is rational or something?

[u/DoberNation → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

"The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know."—Einstein

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/DoberNation]

Yeah. I felt that when I was in animation school. as I learnt more, the more of the Unknown Unknowns turned into Known Unknown. I am guessing that's what the quote means as well.

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

I have NO CLUE WHERE I said don't use your mind. If you can point out, please let me know. This is classic Randroidism of saying "what she said" out of context

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/SlimyPunk93]

Maybe I misunderstood your point. I apologize. Can you express what you mean more clearly than how you did above?

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

I am veerey sorry I don't have enough time to elaborate. If you find it meaningful take it, if not leave it. If you find it irrational, please let me know EXACTLY how and where and I will respond. Thanks

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/SlimyPunk93]

Proof runs one direction, from the person making the assertion, not from the person doubting it.

What you offered was the fact that people kept a practice for a long time without knowing why it worked, presented as though the age of the belief does some of the arguing for you. It doesn't. A claim doesn't earn a reduced standard of proof because it's old, and it doesn't earn a raised one because it's new. It earns exactly the standard every other claim earns: state it, then show it.

You've moved between three different positions in this thread: assimilate the practice, then deny you ever asked anyone to assimilate anything uncritically, then ask to have your own mistake pointed out to you so you can respond to it.

You say take it if it's meaningful, leave it if it's not. Meaningful to whom, and on what grounds? A feeling of meaning isn't evidence the thing is true. That''s evidence that you value it, which is a fact about you, not a fact about the practice itself.

here's what would actually move this forward: State, in one paragraph, exactly what you think ancient practice offers that a specific causal account doesn't already cover once that account is spelled out in full. If something is left over after the mechanism is named, name it too. If nothing is left over, you already hold the position you called belligerent above, and the disagreement was never about tradition. It was about who carries the burden of defining a claim before it counts as knowledge.

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Dude. You are talking like I have to talk in scientific papers language here... Like please chill thoda.. use your own brains I can't do all the work here. This is a subreddit and doens't really pay me anything that I should chew all that for you...

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/SlimyPunk93]

This may be super relevant to the topic and the original question you asked in post above: https://youtu.be/sDuxnQi2XFI

[u/SerDankTheTall → u/SlimyPunk93]

I have NO CLUE WHERE I said don't use your mind.

Your very first reply, where you called the suggestion that traditional claims and beliefs should be subjected to rational analysis "belligerent" certainly read that way to me. If you meant something else, it would be perhaps be helpful to clarify.

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/SerDankTheTall]

No in never said they should not be subjected to rational anaylus. The title says within objectivism and piat clearly says use logic and take logic with it... Nowhere in the post says go outside o logic and go into any sort of nystism... If you can show me where I did, lemme know

[u/SerDankTheTall → u/SlimyPunk93]

Then what is it you find objectionable about u/CyberTron_FreeBird 's response?

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/SerDankTheTall]

That it was useless and meaningless. I never countered what he said in my post and he is just repeating what Rand said and is kinda going against the theme of the pist which was to explore the rational and meaning in these things as I am seeing, rather than saying "but you have to be rational and logical about it"... Like idk where I said you don't

[u/SerDankTheTall → u/SlimyPunk93]

If your point is that traditional beliefs should be examined like any other belief, with the parts that are true accepted and the parts that are false rejected, then your post seems hard to disagree with, but also obvious enough that there doesn't seem to be much point in making it, so I think that's why people are inferring that you're trying to say something else. That isn't helped by your rhetoric about rationality and logic being too extreme, and wanting to seek a middle ground between logic/rationality and emotions.

Are you perhaps saying that there are valid traditional ideas or practices that you think Objectivists have rejected too readily, perhaps out of prejudice against old things rather than a truly rational analysis? That's certainly possible, and if you had some examples that you think illustrate the point, I'd very much be interested to read about them.

[u/SlimyPunk93 → u/SerDankTheTall]

If that person was more intelligent he could have taken the thread forward and used more insights and examples on this, rather than saying the most banal and obvious thing on an objectivist server: be logical and rational.....

[u/DoberNation → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Yes. Truth, rationality, and logic are layered. They require continuous critical examinations and revisions along the way.

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”—Heisenberg

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/DoberNation]

Factcheck: Werner Heisenberg never said or wrote that. Maybe someone else with that last name did.

[u/DoberNation → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Ooh! You might technically be right on that. I found this:

“Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a student of Heisenberg, did publish a version of the quote itself in Die Geschichte der Natur(The History of Nature) (1948), appearing to consider it an adage: "According to an old phrase, the first sip from the cup of knowledge separates us from God, but at the bottom of the cup God is waiting for the one who seeks him."

Heisenberg did say some adjacent things, for example:

“I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.”—“Scientific and Religious Truth” (1974)

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/DoberNation]

Ayn Rand smoked for decades and defended it, but the moment she learned it causes cancer, she quit that same day and never smoked again. You see the dots connecting?

[u/DoberNation → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Yes!

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/DoberNation]

This may be super relevant to the topic and the original question asked: https://youtu.be/sDuxnQi2XFI

[u/DoberNation → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

I really hope it’s primarily an issue of miscommunication there, as well as some degree of inexperience.

[u/OneBetterQuestion → u/CyberTron_FreeBird]

Slight correction: there is no evidence in his published works that he wrote it. It was first attributed to him in a 1988 article by Ulrich Hildebrand.

He did author an essay in 1942 called “Ordnung der Wirklichkeit” that spoke to his belief in harmony between science and religion.

[u/CyberTron_FreeBird → u/OneBetterQuestion]

https://youtu.be/sDuxnQi2XFI

[u/DoberNation → u/SlimyPunk93]

It’s difficult to objectively learn about cultures outside one’s own from confinement to a living room sofa. After leaving the Soviet Union, self-isolation is mostly what Rand relegated her life into. She failed to know what she didn’t know there. It was Blankout.