| | I used the word "perceptions" but once in my post, I believe, not "quite often," though maybe you quoted the word "perceptions" as a way to summarize many of the equivalent words I used, rather than to quote one word I used over and over. Either way, no big deal. As for the meaning of perceptions or percepts, I probably don't know the correct definition, it's true. I just use such words because they sum up what I mean, in so far as I know what they sum up. Now, to correct you slightly, or to correct myself perhaps, I don't "accuse Objectivists of lacking the ability to perceive certain subtleties," so much as accuse them of not accepting the possibility that they lack the ability. If someone said to another person, for example, that they'd experienced a mind blowing change in understanding, of a sort that can't be explained in words, yet definitely goes against Objectivist grain, I would expect that the hearer of this, if an honest-to-himself person, who hadn't yet explained how existence can exist, would wonder if maybe the words they just heard were coming to them from a "perception" that had not ever breathed through their own mind so far. (A rather long sentence sorry) But I never see it in Objectivism: there's this closed-mindedness that annoys the hell out of me, largely because Objectivism is supposed to be open to gaining access into the farthest reaches. I think, however, that one reason Objectivists dismiss so-called odd or insane views is that they only ever respond to the surface of them, the tip of the nose. I mean, the descriptions of understandings that I could offer up today are almost the same as what I could have offered up years ago about different understandings. In other words, there's a surface of words, and a life behind them that is always far more precise in itself than the words are of it. And I often think that Objectivists inject their own head-space - both childhood and adult head-spaces intermingled - into what others say when the saying is mystical in nature, without even being conscious of it. They take from the speaker's words a slant on life that they themselves had experienced years previously, not knowing how off course this can be with the speaker's real place of core up-surge. (Not that it's exclusive to Objectivism, this destructive perception-complication). As for my use of life and death language, you know full well what I mean. I mean death of the body when I say death, while the spirit lives on, if indeed it does (I'm uncertain}. I don't know why you tried to complicate things there by asking me such a thing. Rather interesting.
|
|
