Our Dumb Sentences

The dumbestest sentence of all (which reflects societies' biggest issues) is: "Everything is relative." Or the same thing again: "Everything is opinion and perspective." Or they like to say, "We all just have our own narratives."

Self-destructive humans cannot hide from their revealing statements. Statements that reveal how detached they are from value centering. To them - though its not actually possible - we all live in subjective bubbles with no way out. "Everything is a matter of opinion."

Oh, really? Well is your statement "Everything is opinion," just a matter of opinion? Because if so, It might be best to ignore you.

Rand was right to condemn "subjectivism." If you read her carefully you will find this is what she believes is our biggest problem. Her predecessor, Friedrich Nietzsche, with his "God is dead," meant the same thing. It means that value is decentered and that it has been removed as an option for the remnant of social philosophy, the intellectual effect on the common man. Humans without value orientation are free to believe anything with no center of meaning, with nothing as a point of comparison for anything else. In the least they could argue that there is no meaning to be centered, but then it would become obvious that this notion is unsustainable, and then at least we could have a serious debate.

While it's true that you have your opinion and I have mine, we would not be able to have those opinions at all if language didn't work in some sense objectively. That is to say: independent of our opinions. It's true we live complicated and subjective lives, but the point of this life is communication and agreement and cooperation, and that can only be achieved by comparing our subjective beliefs. Without objectivity, subjectivity would be meaningless because there would be no space outside the circle with which to create its border.

The boundaries or edges of a circle have no meaning without the space outside the circle. If there was no "outside," the circle would cease to exist. It would no longer be a thing or a shape or a circle - it would I suppose then be everything (a meaningless concept).

We understand right and wrong, true and false, by comparing them to a standard of value (not to opinion). Our personal lives might be subjective, but life itself becomes a standard, our life and every other life (the concept of life). Life is an external concept - life as in "not dead" - and our subjective bubble cannot end somewhere unless it has a boundary and this "edge" cannot exist without the outside (the non-bubble). We call this outside stuff the objective world.

Every other obscurant philosophy that differs from this commonsense outline becomes merely a game because it operates from the premise that meaning can be completely decentered. Even when their goal is to create this centering, they cling to rules that don't allow it. This game has taken the place of man's evolution as a rational being and has enabled a form of self-destruction. There are reasons that subjectivist and hyper-critical philosophers have lamented parts or all of their work (Hume and Heidegger). Hume could not unravel his own identity principles (see the appendix to the "Treatise"). Heidegger famously recanted all of his hopes about a unifying principle of being. (see below)

Russell made fun of the statement "Everything is relative" by claiming rightly: "there would then be nothing for it to be relative to," (PIP). We cannot be immersed in pure subjectivity anymore than a circle can be immersed in nothingness. The reason a circle is a circle is because something outside it created boundaries around it of things that are different. A continent is a continent because it is surrounded by water. The same is true for us. We are material surrounded by other material. Our thoughts, whatever they are, exist because they have a relationship to the outside world. The entire point of realism is the premise that thoughts about an object (maybe different, maybe not) have as their object something different and real.

The ideas of externality and differentiation/identity are so obvious and so necessary that they precede scientific things like gravity. The law of gravity seems universal, but it just as easily might not have been. This is not true for externality. The idea of a singular consciousness (a Cartesian possibility?) defies the meaning of the world consciousness - a thing perceiving things. You couldn't have one consciousness with absolutely nothing else, because there would be nothing to compare the consciousness to.

This premise seems so obvious that it has a status over and above any possible armchair philosophy. What has in the past antagonized commonsense - in this realm - must be called a game. And the product of this game is what we see today - irrationality and self-destruction. I'm sorry this sounds so value-centered and not, perhaps, commensurate with your unexamined opinions about subjectivity and equality.

Heidegger's failures:

"Well, there are a number of reasons why Heidegger says that this project failed. One of these reasons is that he became suspicious of asking the question of Being from the perspective of the one who asks the question of Being, in other words, from the perspective of Dasein. Two, because he became disenchanted with the idea of finding a fundamental ontology which underlies all epochs of ontology." (taken from Quora, in regards to "Being and Time")