Take a good long look at human beings in their actual practices and motives; bring the utmost psychological and bio-economic factors to bear on making sense of their illusions and delusions. What then would the truth have to be, such that such human beings are FIT TO KNOW IT at all, even provisionally or tentatively?
Kenny SmithPhilosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about the caustic or cauterizing effect of the truth, not the currying of sensibilities.
Kenny SmithAs always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).
Kenny SmithHuman cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.
Kenny SmithEducation in philosophy is energy speaking to energy, a higher perspective of spirit that is trying to awaken its next natural generation to something beyond the stupid appearances of things.
Kenny SmithThere is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits.
Kenny Smith