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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (480382)	10/1/2021 12:41:28 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 541249

With all due respect you are not understanding my reasons for thinking Plato and the others are basically existentialists. I am aware of Plato's idea of forms, but I simply put that down to his living 2500 years ago, Nietzsche was also a terrible sexist, but a giant in his time. As I have explained, existentialism is "an observation", the particular deficiencies in any one's thinking does not negate the overall designation, IMO. For example, with Plato I look at his thinking in the Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic, where he has identified the illusion humans live in. He was a pioneer, so he got lots of stuff wrong by modern knowledge, but also a giant in his time, and as Will Durant said had contemporary thinking ---"The dominate quality of the Greek mind/ was theirs/ his persistent effort to subordinate myth to reason." It is Plato's "higher order thinking" as well as the others that make them existentialists, IMO. A better example might be the Counter Culture of the 60's, which I call the first large existentialist movement in the history of humankind. This was born out of a collective observation that our norms and mores and myths were primitive, and there was a more sophisticated way of looking at the world---seeing a larger picture of reality that dismissed the primitive cultural myths we were all born with as just that, primitive thinking. The "observation" of such. Who did and did not observe this primitive thinking. <, Plato is an Existentialist because he is Plato and lived through his senses. Platonic realism is the philosophical position that universals or abstract objects exist objectively and outside of human minds. If this is true, there is some aspect that does does not comport with physical human agency. That is not patently atheistic or humanist but is certainly not Existentialist. Absurd has a classical meaning of "poorly reasoned". A set that is a set of all things, including itself, is not particularly useful set. For instance math can only be done on some objects - and not others - we can't add a "cat" and a "dog" unless we group them in a set. Only then can we say there are "two animals" because we have made them interchangeable in this context. We might as well call your Existentialism a "thingamajig" because it has properties that deny large areas of historical Existentialism and assigns ones you personally prefer instead . An Existentialist gives value to human lives only through participating the human condition. This can involve God or not, based upon the judgment of the person evaluating the evidence of their thoughts and senses. A number of Existentialists (Kierkegaard, Unamuno) were clearly religious. You would like to declare them not Existentialists because you are an Atheist - that is sort of like saying someone who lives in Georgia isn't a Georgian because they are not racist. You have never provided the "necessary and sufficient" metrics you use to put someone in the Existentialist bucket. It apparently involves people who clearly would not self-declare such - by you doing it for them, it is pretty "absurd".