Who is His referring to?

[removed]

>More precisely, faith must be based on subjective experience; knowledge is based on what other people experienced.

no, knowledge is based on your own experience too unless you are claiming

next people lie to themselves via faith routinely in the millions, just look at how 80%+ of religious believers have faith in things they themselves injected into their holy texts.

faith in no way excludes lying and knowledge can be based on subjective experience.

certainty is the enemy of growth.

Compared to our potential. Time and time again I see we will never achieve it fully. And it's not helping our social structures does not reward certain actions compared to short sighted unfiltered goals.

I think there is objective reality but we lack the tools to interact with it in it's complete form because it wasn't really useful for our survival within our evolutionary process. An interface of simplified perception was way more energy efficient to stay alive and still achieved the purpose of reproduction. This interface called body has enough senses to ask the right questions and look for answers up to certain point but at the same time is not satisfying if you gathered enough independently tested scientific knowledge.

I'm sorry I couldn't write a lot as I am at my phone, I will try to explain better when I get to my pc. I will try to do my best to understand your position that triggered a reaction by my words.

I think the fact that the man singlehandedly started existentialism is enough to justify reading him. The problems we face in modern today (depression, suicide, anxiety, isolation in spite of connectedness) were all predicted by Kierkegaard. If you want a good and highly relevant place to start I would recommend his short book "The Present Age".

I'm taking an Existentialism class at my university atm and it's quite astonishing how every single philosopher of existence (Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Kafka, Camus, De Beauvoir, etc.) has read Kierkegaard. His influence speaks for itself.

You're on the corr3ct path. Keep going.

[removed]

[removed]

I don't read Kierkegaard, but that headline makes it sound like a major part of his philosophy is "Don't be like all the rest! Be exceptional!" Like every Instagram influencer ever. This doesn't sound deep or useful to me. It sounds kinda toxic. You can't change the world with exceptional outliers. Is it a badly written headline? Or bad philosophy?

"There are two kinds of people in the world: enlightened philosophers like me who understand the real world, and cave-dwellers staring at flickering shadows on the wall."

The Sinner Season 3

I found him in 2005 (age 26), I took a philosophy 101 to get enough scores to get into uni, changed my life. His mercy is the best mercy. Made me a humanist on the spot.

He also deeply misunderstood the historical context of the Bible. His thoughts on Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac are tedious and misinformed. It’s a parable to demonstrate child sacrifice (a Semitic practice at the time) wasn’t bad, but no longer necessary.

> Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.

No, it is literally impossible for anybody to know what is causing their own experiences or if their experiences accurately reflect reality, without engaging in suitable external examination. If you're only going by your own internal experiences, by definition you cannot verify your internal experiences. Internal experiences cannot verify themselves. It is a fundamental epistemic limit and anti-philosophical to imply otherwise.

> You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches

Every person alive is fundamentally the same kind of person and their experiences draw from the same neurological basis, unless your brain is literally broken. There is no experience that is valid for one person that is not valid for another. Either things are windows to reality we can reasonably trust, or they aren't. There is no case-by-case basis on this.

> You're assuming they aren't lying.

Yes, that's what the peer-review and reproducibility elements of the process are about. People can fabricate evidence, or they can simply make mistakes, their bias can blind them to flaws, so that means other people then step in to reproduce the results or critique the method. And, at the end of the day, if you have an issue with somebody else's writing, you can follow their method and see what happens. Nothing is ever perfect, and all "knowledge" has a degree of uncertainty, but that uncertainty is not equal for all methods or all claims.

> You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing"

I was using science experiments as an example of how to examine the world in predictable ways in order to establish facts about the world, I wasn't equating anything.

> As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.

What ignorant people's feelings are has no bearing on whether or not faith is a valid metric for reliable truth.

Free will cannot be criticized because criticism itself is dependent upon a will to truth. People talk about free will like it’s such absolutist terms - if there is any environmental constraint or causes, then how can I be free? Freedom, like truth and gravity and substance, is a relative thing. We seek more freedom, we evolve towards freedom and if we are constrained, we struggle against those constraints. It IS possible to choose to confine ourselves or others with our beliefs, but at some point we used our free will to adopt those beliefs.

Yeah, you’re misinterpreting his argument. Speculative reason as in objective reason (Descartes, hegel). I don’t know what the etymology behind that is but it’s not equivalent to colloquial speculation.

Again, I’d read his argument before judging prematurely. His whole point is faith in god shouldn’t be “based on evidence” so you’re not in disagreement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_reason

If I sound aggressive, it’s not because I’m railing against you, but a philosophical stance I find facile and ill-thought. Your reply just gave me a chance to unload something that’s been stirring inside.

There ARE problems with your statement- for one it assumes an objective reality outside of ourselves

• independent of our observation or interaction. The refuting of this idea would take longer than I have right now, but suffice it to say that there is nothing to logical stand on there.

As far as humans being weak, I’ll just have to ask, compared to what?

Reminded me of this gem of a twitter account: @KimKierkegaard

Basically Kierkegaard quotes mixed with Kim Kardashian tweets.

[removed]

I don't think we interact with reality in its pure form at all so talking about free will and randomness is whole another debate. Although you are aggressive with your assumptions about me I don't think what I wrote was psychological reaction. All I am saying is we are not content without objective purpose en masse and that causes issues.

Humans in my humble estimation including me inherently weak because they had to be ignorant in some things to survive this long.

This probably depends on who you consider to be a “philosopher” to a degree, especially if one definitionally excludes anyone who also engaged in theology as a primary focus. One could argue that there were plenty of folks in the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition prior to Kierkegaard (Augustine, Aquinas) who delved heavily into sin as well.

||Just want to point out human memory is notoriously inaccurate,||

Most are. Some people are afflicted with videographic memory. Don't assume your experience is universal.

|| its completely possible to decieve yourself. ||

You say this as if people don't lie to each other all the time. If "filtering the conclusions against reasonable considerations" is a factor when listening to others, then it may be presumed to be a factor when listening to the self.

As such, the observation about deceit is not relevant, is it?

||Faith appears to me as a tautology.||

Faith in your subjective experience has been this way. Ours approach differs. ~shrug~ Until you understand how we see it, your perspective is based off of just one way of looking at things, innit?
Since you could be deceiving yourself... might make sense to check.

>The problem is that you only know what you feel, you don't know what causes that feeling in actuality or if those feelings are accurate analogues to reality.

Perhaps you only know that. Be careful asserting what others understand - you have no awareness of what they experience.
Since you just went on a paragraph & change about that exact perspective... maybe we ought to apply that approach to your statement, & start over?

||There are many things we feel that are complete fabrications or distortions of reality.||

You say that as if that's the final step. For you, it may be. For others, there may be other approaches... so you may want to slow down a little.

||Knowledge may be primarily based on the writings of others, but the power of those writings is that they meticulously document their process and ergo you can analyze that process for accuracy. ||

You're assuming they aren't lying. Since people practice lying all the time, especially to themselves (as you've just pointed out) should anyone trust what another wrote without verifying it for themselves?

||For things like science experiments, you can see when those experiments have been reliably duplicated and you can duplicate them on your own id you put in the effort. That is the foundation of our science classes in school.||

You've skipped a couple of steps - you are now equating "science" with "knowing" which is has not been established, so your statement is unsupported.
Particularly when science classes are precluded from teaching things that make "average" people emotionally uncomfortable, not because of the accuracy of the science, but because of the feelings of the people who know better.

As such, our perception of the world you describe in practice is that knowledge is dismissed by ignorant people whose feelings are disrupted by new things they are being told... because the average person is mostly disconnected from understanding what their feelings are, due to their lack of practice in managing them.

Are we understanding each other at this stage?

I think it can go the other way though. Free will can be criticized by appealing to randomness or order.