From Being a post-communist, east-German child in the early 90ies.

Born in the lonely valleys of communist East-Germany, my childhood was dominated by the early communist education and the transition into a Western social market economy. With the crumbling wall, I also saw many biographies falling apart. My parents had to adjust to a new economic reality while having three little children. Their education was, of course, not really suitable for the new system. While we were all adjusting, politically extremist positions were thriving in the country. Living in a standard communist housing block, our doors were simple and unlocked most of the time. From one day to the other, we replaced the old pressed paper-door with a stable wooden door and also installed a “safe” lock. From that moment, we had to ask through the door when somebody was knocking: “Who is there?”

After the reunification, we soon learned that capitalism was the joke in which East-Germans were the butt. So when the first Burger King opened its doors, we were inspired by shiny commercials to have our first-in-a-lifetime burger. The commercials promised golden slices of toasted bread sandwiching fresh salad, fresh tomatoes and perfectly bbqed meat. Arriving in the newly-built mall, there was a line that came out of the store and went all the way through the hallway. After hours of waiting, we got two sponges with a lump of meat and a slice of cucumber inside, while paying an east-German child’s fortune for it (had I just invested it in McDonald’s back then). The burger was created with the magical, secret ingredient: “no love”. For real, I never ate a burger before, but I immediately learned that also capitalism was about its message not about its content. The East-German cantinas had that ingredient too, but we didn’t turn it into a secret and hid it behind commercials. As school kids we got every Friday a meal that everybody even the cooks called “dead grandmother” (Tote Oma). It was disgusting. Luckily the tables in the dining hall had drawers, in which I intended to dump my meals. Once, I opened one of them, it was already filled with this sort of dead grandmother. It was kind of okay that we buried the GDR there.

When I was born, America was a far-away country. Not only it was far, it occurred like an impossible fantasy island, a world that only existed on TV. I remember how my parents were watching Dallas barely recognizing the picture on TV since the signal was disturbed by the East-German government. Western TV was forbidden in the east and so everybody installed little antenna on his balcony to reach out to the unfiltered world of commercials. America was like a myth during my childhood, mostly a paradise of toys and cartoons. Had somebody told my grandmother that I would be teaching in the US one day, let alone receive my PhD from an American university, she would have talked about what she would do if she won in the lottery.

With the reeducation after the fall of the wall, I have learned that there is no political position that cannot shift in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, Neo-Nazis and punks were roaming the streets, youngsters exploring the freedom of ideas, dangerous and less evil-eyed than Americans usually imagine the evil Nazi-villain of their own mythological culture. Born into the left-leaning lower middle-class, we were usually afraid of skinheads and sometimes beaten up by children “performing” ideology. I became sensitive to all ideologies. At school, we still performed German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, dealing with the past in order to understand German crime in the aftermath of WWII. Yet, on the playground, football fields and in the shopping malls where teenagers hung out, it was mixed with a fashionable economical mind-set of free ideas. Who was one day on the right could be easily on the left the next and vice versa. More as an ideology it became the desperate question of East-German identity.

After my civil-service at the age of 19, and long periods of dealing with psychologically ill people, born with East-German shyness and German Angst, I studied in Halle, a beautiful but small city. It was the city of Händel when he was not famous and also of Husserl before his success. Halle was the city were people lived but had no success. Only later, I transitioned to West-Germany, Cologne. The east-German complexes remained.

21 years after the fall of the wall, my father was visiting me by train. During his train ride, he sat at the window watching carefully the landscape. At some point, he said to himself: “This must be West-Germany”. For East-Germans, not only America but also West-Germany had been a far away place. His former French girlfriend that he met in one of the East-German summer-camps spiked his dream to go to Paris one day. But since his mind was far away, he never made it. For East-Germans, the world itself was far and the world began 40 minutes away from their small city.

My English remained poor but with some travels through France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal I improved. Finally, I applied in the US for a PhD and was luckily accepted.

Pittsburgh was a life-changing experience. I studied Continental philosophy with an American perspective, yet, at the same time, I could take seminars at Pittsburgh University that was considered to be the number 1 address for philosophy at that time. Finally, I wrote my dissertation about Robert Brandom (back then, the most renowned philosopher in the world).

After having studied philosophy from an East-German, Continental and American perspective, I decided to learn Chinese. Right now, I am lecturer for British and American Literature, as well as for Western Civilization in China.

Blogziel:

• Persönlichkeiten entwickeln, für mich selbst an und für sich, Grenzen ausloten, Berge in die Nähe von Propheten versetzen, Bäume ausreißen, Urwälder anpflanzen, Ethik bedenken, Warnen, Lehrer belehren, Warnschilder aufstellen, Steinlabyrinthe einreißen, Systematizität, Nachsitzen, späte Rache durch Erfolg (?), die Eule der Minerva in der Dämmerung zähmen, fliegen lernen
• Genaue Prüfung verschiedener Lerntheorien
• Analyse von Bildungsideen

Competences

I have held more than 20 Seminars in the Bereich Philosophie, unzählige Tutorien:

• formale Logik, transzendentale Logik
• Wissenschaftstheorie
• Ethik (über das Teilen und Herrschen in Platons Staat, dem Hobbeschen Krieger bis zur Gesprächsethik)
• Übergroße Portionen an Kant serviert, mit Hegel ausgehegelt und existenziale Abgründe von Heidegger in mich blicken lassen
• Mal ehrlich: Meine Studenten glaubten einem Chemieprofessor, dass es wissenschaftlich möglich wäre, dass „Big Foot“ existiert. Die seltenen Sichtungen wurden dadurch erklärt, dass er durch Wurmlöcher reisen würde. Der Professor hatte dies mit angeblicher Quantentheorie erklärt und einige Physikhobbysportler haben sich dann damit unnötiger Weise auseinangergesetzt
• Im Gegensatz interessiert mich vorrangig, was wir wirklich wissen können, dabei ist die Pseudowissenschaftlichkeit auch unter Leuten, die an der Universität arbeiten, erschreckend
• British Literature

NEWSLETTER

https://normanschultz.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=3c24ea2b197eb3d53464e1519&id=c6f56fba4d

Ich denke gerne über das Lernen nach und möchte mich selbst gerne noch weiterentwickeln.Meine „Karriere“

Meine Lernerfolge habe ich leider nicht im schulischen Bereich sammeln können. Ich bin in Englisch sitzen geblieben, im Folgejahr knapp mit 4,45 versetzt worden. Knapp hätte ich das Abitur verpasst. Englisch in der Schule ergab für mich wenig Sinn. Im Abi habe ich mich dann angestrengt und mit Mathe und Musik (Klavierspiel), einen doch guten Abischnitt hingelegt (1,8). Von da an habe ich mehr und mehr verstanden, worum es eigentlich geht.

Obwohl mich also Schule dennoch niemals so wirklich interessierte, war ich immer interessiert, zu lernen. „Lernen“ habe ich versucht, auszubauen, bin allerdings an viele Grenzen, vor allem an institutionelle und soziale Grenzen gestoßen. Auch meine Motivation war immer eines der Hauptprobleme.

Blogziele

Dieser Blog soll sich mit diesen Grenzen bei allen Phänomenen und Themen rund ums Lernen auseinandersetzen und vor allem die Grenze des Lernens erweitern. Dabei möchte ich nicht irgendwelche Plausibilitätsargumente in den Mittelpunkt stellen. Es soll nicht allgemein darum gehen, dass ich unbewiesene Behauptungen so wie etwa die Lerntypentheorie von Vesters anführe, sondern darum einen Zugang zum Lernen zu schaffen, wobei wir dabei schon lernen. Es geht also auch darum herauszufinden, was wir überhaupt über das Lernen wissen können.

Ich habe in Köln Philosophie, Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Soziologie und Musikwissenschaft studiert. Ich fotografiere in meiner Freizeit.

Es geht jedoch auch um prinzipielle Methodenfragen, wie wir schneller bestimmte Inhalte lernen können. In diesem Sinne geht es um eine doppelte Bewusstmachung: Sowohl das Lernen als auch die Frage, was wir über das Lernen wissen können stehen im Mittelpunkt.

Natürlich stellt sich die Frage, warum ich befähigt bin, über das Lernen nachzudenken. Ich glaube, dass ich mit dem breiten Studium, was Wissen sein kann (Philosophie), einiges an Kompetenzen erworben habe, um die Frage nach dem Lernen überhaupt zu stellen. Selbst habe ich darüber hinaus meinen Magister mit Auszeichnung abgeschlossen und promoviere mit Stipendium an einer englischsprachigen Universität. Ich glaube daher, einiges an Selbsterfahrung mit einbringen zu dürfen, auch wenn ich angesichts anderer Größen wie Tim Ferriss oder Steve Pavlina eher schüchtern sein sollte.

Soviel erstmal dazu. Ich hoffe Sie begleiten mich und abonnieren meinen Blog per E-mail, RSS oder Facebook.

Norman Schultz

Meine anderen Blogs:

www.pusteblumenbaby.de (zusammen mit Maja, wo es um Erziehung ohne Gewalt geht)

www.entgrenzen.de (ein popularphilosophischer Blog)

www.kunst-und-gedanke.de (Kunstblog mit Veronika)

www.fibonaccie.blogspot.de (mein philosophischer Blog, auf dem ich Argumente ausprobiere)

Ich habe noch viele andere Blogs zu kleineren Themen, aber dies sind wohl die ausgereiftesten.

This is a Draft (Ideas are welcome)

To shipwrecked and divers ,

The sirens of education sang their song luring the poor sailors into their arms. With feverish dreams, they crushed their ships on the rocks of an educational wasteland. Captured by the lullaby of self-improvement, they reduced their whole life to a few remarks in a CV: a bachelor degree in a fringe subjects. Accumulating student debt, their educational odyssey has no end.

Fact is, the strength of knowledge often counts only on the island of the lost. Their knowledge has rarely power outside of an outraged twitter community. Knowledge like beauty hypnotizes the middle-class. Knowledge appears as a gate to further dreams.

Now, in the wasteland of the sweet promise, the enchanting sirens spread their visions, give advice of how to proportionate brain muscles and how to expand the aesthetical self-imprisoned spirit. Mind-builders are left with their self-built mind-maze.

What is its secret purpose of education?

The modern Odysseus travels on an extended seminar through our educational system. Tied to his boat, while his sailors are working, he perceives the song of education. Well-informed that its music is seductive, he still cannot escape. He listens for nearly 20 years until the sweet and promising hymn of education fades. Once he wakes up from every man’s dream, once he sees the lost sailors on the shores of an educational society behind, he is is still carried unwillingly in an uncanny and uncertain future. He has chained himself to the self-murdering project of education that only the middle-class is obliged to.

Yet, the average citizen who can escape the island of dreams will be left with this nostalgia for the sea. They still want to deep-dive in the unbound ocean, they want to unlock their full potential, awaken the giant in themselves or finally habituate success-patterns. It would be a crime to themselves to be pessimistic and desperate.

Self-help Industry Information

And you, shipwrecked diver? Too long, you have been a good listener and passive learner following the enchanting promise of the sirens. These sweet songs that the siren-professors sing from their tenure-track hill. Now, you want to look behind the curtain of their social theater, you search for their hidden curriculum and their secret, unconscious will.

Yet, your critical spirit has grown and after 20 years of education, conspiracy theories and educational snake-water won’t do it for you anymore. Now, you look into the abyss of the ocean and everyday that water stares back into you:

“Estimates place the size of the deep web at between 96% and 99% of the internet.”

“Accessing the Deep Web requires specialized knowledge and tools, as well as an anonymity network to guarantee privacy protection for users. Tor is an example of such a vehicle.”

Passages cited from the internet

You invest in bitcoin, dogecoins, altcoins and create the jobs of the future. Maybe, you wanted to find this solid core of golden motivation amidst a current self-improvement-depletion. You are tired from news cycles around the everyday apocalypse. Yet, far away from drone wars, mass-incarcerations, and cultural extermination, from presidents and their droning ego-project, far away from sickness and torment of education, you, the every man lives, in the moderate torture wheel of a 9 to 5 economy. Though after your work, you are condemned to prepare for an entrepreneurial escape, there is still too much energy left to sleep and dream.

You, the other, has internalized the promise of education, which means that you have to kill yourself. You cannot stop with this project of turning yourself against yourself. The remaining cultural forces redirect your inborn rage towards your incomplete nature. You hate that the genetic lottery has not chosen a genius brain for you. Nature, the unfair distributor of talents, shall be, as education has assured, conquered by your culture that is also you. The hidden curriculum you have internalized so far can be summarized:

You cannot remain yourself.
You must become an identity.
You have to become better.
You must become a learned man*.
You cannot be your current imperfect identity.
You must kill your former self.

As a result, you have sworn an oath for life-long-learning. You are the dead man walking. You learned to be a shell, an empty cell of death, something that becomes and never is. You are a Westernized buddhist, a form without stable content .

Now, you are ready for employing your trained critical spirit and discover your personal conspiracy theory in the deep web.

This was the first step.

2. Step: Realize the Man-Manipulation of all Surroundings

There are only a few resorts of nature left. Most of your surrounding were already touched and altered by human hands. “One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence.” Born as a clean slate, as a tabula rasa, we have forgotten that Being lurks behind the shadows of these beings.

Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made.”
― Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

The waves of flesh flush through a normal day. Most of the time, you attempt to elegantly surf on the “sea of troubles”. You follow the sight of Google’s eye once you enter the internet. Now you might decide to dive.

Be aware: any new idea might be a Point of No Return exposing you to an “ascension curse” that will prevent you from an unaltered return. Be brave because what can be worse than the trauma of being born chained to a promise of social identity? More and more you will say “no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. To sleep, perchance to dream […] for in that sleep of death what dreams may come”. You want to find this American dreamlike state of being. Yet, the abyss of your American dreams may effect you as follows (Made from Abyss):

1. Light dizziness akin to Decompression Sickness.”

Contextual web: pages with content varying for different access contexts.

2. – Heavy nausea, numbness of limbs, headaches.

Dynamic content: dynamic pages, which are returned in response to a submitted query or accessed only through a form, especially if open-domain input elements (such as text fields) are used; such fields are hard to navigate without domain knowledge.

3. – Loss of balance, visual and auditory hallucinations in addition to the above effects.

Limited access content: sites that limit access to their pages in a technical way (e.g., using the Robots Exclusion Standard or CAPTCHAs, or no-store directive, which prohibit search engines from browsing them and creating cached copies).^[22]

4. – Whole-body pain, bleeding from every orifice.

Non-HTML/text content: textual content encoded in multimedia (image or video) files or specific file formats not handled by search engines.

Private web: sites that require registration and login (password-protected resources).

Scripted content: pages that are only accessible through links produced by JavaScript as well as content dynamically downloaded from Web servers via Flash or Ajax solutions.

5. – Loss of all sensation, increased likelihood of self-harm.

Software: certain content is intentionally hidden from the regular Internet, accessible only with special software, such as Tor, I2P, or other darknet software. For example, Tor allows users to access websites using the .onion server address anonymously, hiding their IP address.

6. – Loss of Humanity, very possibly death.

Unlinked content: pages which are not linked to by other pages, which may prevent web crawling programs from accessing the content. This content is referred to as pages without backlinks (also known as inlinks). Also, search engines do not always detect all backlinks from searched web pages.

7. – Certain death (alledgedly).

Web archives: Web archival services such as the Wayback Machine enable users to see archived versions of web pages across time, including websites which have become inaccessible, and are not indexed by search engines such as Google. The Wayback Machine may be called a program for viewing the deep web, as web archives that are not from the present cannot be indexed, as past versions of websites are impossible to view through a search. All websites are updated at some point, thats why web archives are considered Deep Web content.^[23]

Quotes from “Made in Abyss”

Third, kill yourself again:

Traveler, you want to dive, dream and die? Too often you assume that death is waiting at the end of this tunnel of wakeness, yet, in fact, he, the grim reaper, is a traveler on your side. While your eyes are open, your soul, made from the same fabric as death, sleeps. You find yourself imprisoned in an ocean of light, a vastness of experiences, a lust for images, a joy of taste that is crossed with a hunger for dreams, the longing of wills, the desires of many beasts in you, a tormenting search for honor and a excruciating quest of pain. All these forces tear on the surfaces of your existence, the absence of goods penetrates like needles. As long as you seek out of desire, you are not yourself. Your body, this thin layer of ice, holds in it all these feelings, centers them around you, and burns them into your memory. What more could you be than this body-like thing?

But there is this thought that penetrates yourself, a glimpse promising a way to your self. A hope offered from the box of the pandora that you opened as your body. You let yourself down on the rope of questions. Rappelling down you risk to loose your grip and loose yourself in the ocean of vast nothingness you are. It is you, you who is speaking to yourself.

Fourth, realize who is speaking with you

“[A text is composed from] more than four hundred smaller [texts] and [fragments]. It extends several thousand [meanings] in all directions. The [core lies] close to the mouth of a river. […] The ruler of this country is not permanent. When disasters result from unusual phenomena, they [inhabitants] unceremoniously replace him, installing a virtuous man as king, and release the old king, who does not dare show resentment. […] “— Gan Ying, prospective Chinese ambassador to Rome^note , c. 97 A.D., providing a fanciful account based on stories from Parthian sailors.

Traveller, the ruler of this text is you. The eyes that slide through the lines and a vivid brain that projects an inner wall of images into the nothing of existence. All of this is you. The voice that sounds in your inner ear is you and the meaning that it invokes in you comes from whatever there is.

Dear traveler, evolution has climbed a mountain for you. It delivered you to the top where the tides of identity nag on your appearance. With each second of reading further you become older and you lose your grip on life. Every second is a chance to die. Yet, what is this second worth considering that millions of individuals died for the sake of our arrival in this corner of the internet. The causal chain of beings and animals has become you. Under the darkness of this fleshy ocean wave of creatures, you will find yourself, a meaningless abyss that stares into people as it stares in itself. You the abyss, welcomes you as you stare through reflection into yourself. If you stare long enough into yourself, an abyss will stare back.

Something in me writes to you that has just become you and that has always been you. Wherever you go, there is empty body following your thoughts, it attempts to catch you. Like the shadow follows your body, your body follows you. Wherever there is silence, you will be chased by this voice. It will talk to you. While 30,000 sensations flood your body each second, while some light hits your eyes, some air touches your skin, some clothes pressure your body, you just simply are. While millions of organisms in your body secure your meaninglessness, while millions of processes have worked out so that you could live, you got lost in this dark corner of the internet.

Isn’t it a truth of the internet that where ever its users go, they still find only themselves, a body that somehow produces them? The internet is another form of reflecting your ego back to yourself through your body. How pleasant would it be that if we lift the veil of flesh, if we pull the curtain of our organic matter aside and looked into our own soul’s eye?

The truth of human nature is that we want to find ourselves in this lonely dessert of mediated objects. We produce ourselves by projecting inner selves to the outside so that we find them in ourselves. We create ourselves in the stone, on paper, on screen and find only ourselves again and again. The woke negate everything.

Isn’t the only confirmed fact that when we meet people we mainly find ourselves in the other. Isn’t the other only another form of loneliness. How can two lonely people add to each other.

All of this is the attitude of a genuine writer that he wants to truly live in the imagination of somebody else so that the other finds him in himself, and him or herself in me.

So what is this blog about? It was all about you.’

Fifth, Subscribe!

How Relativism supports Dirty Politics?

If there is one thing we’ve learjedin the Trump years, it’s that many people who would have thought themselves relativists turn out to have some pretty solid convictions.

Stephen Krogh

[Trevor Noah] promised to go beyond mining comedy out of candidates eating corn dogs at state fairs. But that doesn’t mean the ultimate goal isn’t to entertain viewers, particularly in a time when news and parodies of news seem to be blending together. “I’m not trying to create a straight-up news show.”

Pointer

For some, it might be surprising that researchers saw the origins of the term fake news represented by the Daily Show. In the meantime, the term ‘fake news’ is attributed to the political opponent who is blamed for the destruction of our political discourses and for the most part follows an evil intent. The origins story of the term, however, reveals that the problem lies deeper and is tied to the structure of the media used on both sides:

The distinction … lies in the characteristics of the modern information age, where almost everyone enjoys online access and is able to generate and spread content… the rise of “fake news” …[is]… a result of the rise of the internet as a source of information and the ability for anyone to post content online to reach an audience.”

Terry Lee

Since on both sides of politics propaganda has its established formats, it must be right to baptize this age as the post-truth-era. Truth becomes a matter of presenting alternative facts or as Rorty has described it quite unironically: “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” With regard to this cynical premise, relativism seems to support the counterfactual fabrication of factoids in the dirty business of politics and it urges the question: Is relativism the philosophical, dark underbelly of fake-news and our political problems?

Philosophy and Relativism

Relativism and philosophy seem to be closely related. In a discourse that lasted more than 2000 years, philosophers consistently returned to its beginning with mostly empty hands. Lawrence Kraus comments on this:

“Of course, philosophy is the field that hasn’t progressed in two thousand years.”

LAWRENCE KRAUSS, 1954 – PRESENTAmerican Atheists National Convention, 2012

Philosophy thus often occurs as a discipline that twists truths, obfuscates our perspectives, and sophistically engages in fruitless battles that lead us to nothing.

Accordingly, philosophy’s dirty relativism occurs as a useful instrument for political discussions. But even though philosophy has a relativizing attitude, its genuine relativism is not essentially related to political cynicism.

On its way, philosophy’s goal was to transcend any stage of knowledge. Alfred Eisleben would say, it attempted to build “a sky-ladder into the nothing of the universe”. Though philosophy achieved by virtue of skepticism higher and higher standpoints, it also attempted to transcend beyond the limits of empirical thinking and thinking overall. It quickly became the attempt to relativize any belief, position or instituted knowledge. While its goal was to constitute real, everlasting knowledge, revolution, quite paradoxically, became its institution leaving nothing to firmly believe in. So while philosophers destroyed superstitions and false theories, oppression and power, they were also responsible for the eroding ground below our house of sciences. Philosophy’s progress has, at the same time, initiated the destruction of our common ground until it was unclear whether any kind of foundation would count as safe anymore. Philosophers like Descartes therefore warned that our building of science would stand on shaky grounds and believed that only a solid foundation could guarantee knowledge.

Despite these predictions and warnings, however, the doomed card-house of sciences still stands. Under the impression of philosophy’s alarmism, pragmatic sciences, producing real knowledge, replaced the seemingly fruitless exercises of philosophy. Philosophy occurs now as a hypothetical debating-club for dandies entertaining themselves or as a mean for politicians twisting truths.

Not so dirty: a positive Note on Relativism

Relativism, like scepticism, is one of those doctrines that have by now been refuted a number of times too often. Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once.

Alasdair MacIntyre 1985:22

Despite our attempts, we could not kill relativism. It was seemingly refuted often and MacIntyre postulates that the denial of acknowledging its refutations speaks for a lack of integrity. If we grasp philosophy, however, as the ultimate human project that could not yet provide a stable, firm and everlasting foundation, then, as I claim, it is relativist. So it is not about disproving relativism, the burden of proof is on the foundationalists.

But also looking at the arguments against relativism, it should become clear that most people fight against skepticism than against relativism. Contrary to popular belief relativism does not imply that there is nothing grasped and nothing gained. In fact, our practical sciences are relativist, too. They formulate theories of knowledge that are only warranted by practical experiences (relativism allows for that). Moreover, at any point, they can revoke there theories and replace them with other theories, especially if our experience fundamentally changes. In other words, we always develop knowledge relative to given conditions of experience. This obviously does not imply that we do not gain knowledge. For example, we learn how to build cars and learn how to drive a car, even though as drivers we do not know many details about it. Engineers might not know the last details of all physical processes, but they know that for practical purposes it will suffice. In other words, we do not need an absolute ground, in order to be practical.

Obviously, it would be absurd to claim that we know nothing just because we do not know something perfectly. Looking at Socrates, we must therefore also wonder whether he said, he knew nothing or whether he meant he does not know absolutely. Then, however, what does it mean to be relativist? Relativists do not deny that we can have knowledge measured with regard to a practical outcome, they are, however, skeptical with regard to absolute knowledge. Thus, serious relativists never claimed that the foundation of our thinking is impossible. Relativism acknowledges that maybe one day we transform our minds and find a particle of knowledge that will reveal the secret ground of our universe. Until this moment, however, we stick with the idea that our knowledge is based on our experiences that may or may not represent the whole of our world. Yet, independent from absolute claims, relativism acknowledges that we produces knowledge relative to our shared experiences.

Relativism is therefore no Friend of Liars

Relativism is not a friend of twisters, liars and sophists. It is not a political attitude but a genuine way of living. It is a way to live and with its reliance on experience that we can share and repeat. With this common ground, it is an answer to liars.

Relativism as a Genuine Way of Living

Beyond our practical experiences, however, we should focus less on the bits of knowledge we know, but compare our knowledge to the our insurmountable ignorance. From the perspective of the absolute, we do not know. Here, we speculate about the meaning of life, true morals, the will of the universe or God, its existence and truth. Here, we are humans wondering about what is. The open questions that lie ahead of us only allowed for relativist answer so far, and that as an experiential fact is our current nature. We are beings who fundamentally wonder about the world, our soul and God. We should rather ask questions than block ourselves with answers.

Questions

Here are some questions that might be relevant for relativism:

1. What is relativism?
2. Who are famous relativists?
3. What is moral relativism and what are other forms of relativism?
4. Are relativists atheists?
5. Are relativists agnostics?
6. Can relativism be a defendable position?
7. Why relativism? Don’t we just see that the world is there?
8. Can we deny that the world exists?

Additional Quotes

• “Although someone’s beliefs and assumptions may not be true and do not describe reality, they will still drive their behavior. So if someone doesn’t believe in truth, count on him to lie. If someone says there are no objective facts, expect her to be careless with facts to further her own interests. If someone explains everything by referring to evolution and the ‘selfish gene,’ be sure that at some point, he will be extremely selfish on behalf of the fitness of his own survival.” Os Guinness,
• Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“…if someone doesn’t believe in truth, count on him to lie. If someone says there are no objective facts, expect her to be careless with facts to further her own interests. If someone explains everything by referring to evolution and the ‘selfish gene,’ be sure that at some point, he will be extremely selfish on behalf of the fitness of his own survival.”

Os Guinness,

Further Thoughts

We all need a solution for the flood of misinformation that has come over us, but is the only ark we have the concept of a shared external reality that we can objectively know? Is there something that can warrant the progress of our society beyond the concept of an external reality? Maybe, it is, indeed, relativism.

Links

(https://youarenotsosmart.com/2020/07/31/yanss-185-why-the-reason-behind-why-some-people-refuse-to-wear-masks-during-a-pandemic-has-little-to-do-with-the-masks-themselves/)

Used References

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/PAP-04-2019-0008/full/pdf?title=the-global-rise-of-fake-news-and-the-threat-to-democratic-elections-in-the-usa

‘The Daily Show’ as a news source?

Words: Digital Wildfire