ok back to it after a couple of days:
HH said :
When a human being thinks, his consciousness is always asking this question: “What IS it?”. The fact that you exist, that your mind functions, means that it functions in a particular manner: You, as a man, are always attempting to analyze your perceptions and to thereby form concepts. You can’t help this, it is simply what a human does.
It therefore follows that: unless every human functions in a different way than everyone else (which would not allow us to form the concept of ‘human’ or any other concept for that matter), truth and morality cannot be subjective. Because we are all the same (human) what is good for me is good for you also. What would harm me would harm you also. (This, btw, is what allows the concept of human rights.)
It may be that someone’s perception of a fact may be erroneous. That does not make truth ‘subjective’. Errors on the part of the perceiver do not imply the ‘subjectivity’ of objective truth. ‘Existence exists’ and your task is to perceive it. That is reality and truth.
I afraid that subjectivity is all there is. To show this i’m refering to a few pages of Pirzig’s to get the essence of the way I’ve been thinking for the last few yrs:
Our culture and our midsets are victim of Myth being greater than Logic. The Mythos over Logos argument is well known to scholars of Greek.
By Logos we mean the sum total rational understanding of the world. Mythos being the sum total of early historic and prehistoric myths/stories that preceded the Logos.
The mythos includes greek myth, old testamnet, Vedic Hymns, Norse sagas - all the early legends of the cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding.
the Mythos over Logos concept shows that our current rationality is shaped by these historical legends, Pirzig says that our knowledge today is in relation to these historic legends as a tree is in relation to the shrub it once was.
He goes onto say that in cultures whose ancestry include ancient Greece, you will find a strong Subject-Object differentiation, as the GRAMMER of the old Greek mythos presumed this division.
In other cultures, eg the Chinese, subject/object language is not as rigidly defined - the philosophy of the culture likewise follows suit.
This is important when we look at the way children are raised - each child is born as ignorant as a caveman, and what stops our culture from reverting to a prehistoric level, is that we are taught the ongoing mythos. The mythos has over time been transformed into logos (the huge amount of common information / knowledge), but the roots are still mythos. In this way, Pirzig says, Religion isnt invented by Man, rather Men are invented by religion.
Our definition of the world around us is made up of anaolgues to our mythos. Example - you find something so brand new, there are no words to describe it - so to describe your discovery to someone else, you have to say - it’s sort of like X but instead of it doing Y, it sort of does Z like the way A does when you do B to it…etc.
Our perception of the world is a pyramid of analogues built on analogues. Your definition of this new thing has to be an analogue - it can’t be anything else. and so the mythos grows by analogies to what has been known before.
And so HH where you say:
Errors on the part of the perceiver do not imply the ‘subjectivity’ of objective truth. ‘Existence exists’ and your task is to perceive it. That is reality and truth.
Each person perceives a concept / object differently to another - based on the mythos one had instilled through youth: ie will the mythos of a middle class white australian man be the same as that of an impoverished latin american subsistance farmer, or that of a high wealth traditional English landed gentleman?
Certainly the mythos roots will be similar - however if each of them were to look at an object, each would see and be able to describe a different thing, and all using the same logos. No description will be erronous, but each description WILL be different.
And each would be telling an objective truth ; from their individual point of view.
There will be as many individual objective truths / realities as there are individual differentiated people.
I hope this is making sense, the thoughts are going round and i dont’ want to repeat myself (too much)
