Im Still Ballin
03-02-2015, 01:25 PM
"The ethical impact of Speculative Realism is worth exploring. The Speculative Realists spend more time on metaphysics/epistemology and not much on the ethical importance of their framework. From what I can gather, some ethical implications of Speculative Realism is thus:
Everything we value and seek is the world "for us". However, the universe is "hollow" in the sense that values, hopes, struggles, are not inherent in the universe itself. Schopenhauer has his Will, a SR might say, and essentially anthropomorphozies the struggle of the individual human perspective to the universe. Plato might have his "Forms" but he is anthropomorphozing these to a "hollow" (non-value) by laying over the universe a veneer of human perspective where it should not be. These reifications are to be banished and the world to be seen as the contingent "stuff" that it is.
I can sympathize with this view of the hollow contingency that is covered with the veneer of human perspective. There are many ways to go about dissecting this. Of course, one is the fact that the "veneer" itself has to be accounted for. This of course brings up ideas of panpsychism and idealism. We will leave those out for now and just focus on the hollowness and the veneer as if they are two separate entities (one the real), and one the "illusion" that is reified. I think it may be reconcilled in existential ideas. The Absurd, the Angst, and the Bored discussed in Camus, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer seem to be getting at a hollowness. It pierces the veneer of humaness but can never truly be "felt" except as interpretation through our human construct. It is only coming at us as an echo through feelings of unease, angst, boredom, etc. Though the unease, angst, bored, unease, and absurd are thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. (things that are of the human or animal perspective), they still might be telling us something of the general hollowness and contingency of the world of the real."
Everything we value and seek is the world "for us". However, the universe is "hollow" in the sense that values, hopes, struggles, are not inherent in the universe itself. Schopenhauer has his Will, a SR might say, and essentially anthropomorphozies the struggle of the individual human perspective to the universe. Plato might have his "Forms" but he is anthropomorphozing these to a "hollow" (non-value) by laying over the universe a veneer of human perspective where it should not be. These reifications are to be banished and the world to be seen as the contingent "stuff" that it is.
I can sympathize with this view of the hollow contingency that is covered with the veneer of human perspective. There are many ways to go about dissecting this. Of course, one is the fact that the "veneer" itself has to be accounted for. This of course brings up ideas of panpsychism and idealism. We will leave those out for now and just focus on the hollowness and the veneer as if they are two separate entities (one the real), and one the "illusion" that is reified. I think it may be reconcilled in existential ideas. The Absurd, the Angst, and the Bored discussed in Camus, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer seem to be getting at a hollowness. It pierces the veneer of humaness but can never truly be "felt" except as interpretation through our human construct. It is only coming at us as an echo through feelings of unease, angst, boredom, etc. Though the unease, angst, bored, unease, and absurd are thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. (things that are of the human or animal perspective), they still might be telling us something of the general hollowness and contingency of the world of the real."