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Cormagh asked in Arts & HumanitiesPhilosophy · 10 years ago

Isn't Absolutism the same as Nihilism?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called it, "the night in which all cows are black". Doesn't Absolutist thinking wear down Science in general? How has it affected you in your private life?

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  • 10 years ago
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    I do not see the connection. As a matter of fact, I must reject it because if the statement you used about "the night in which all cows are black" actually has any relevance, then it is in the fact that absolutism didn't make all cows black on the night in question--nature did. Absolutism only admitted that they were, indeed, all black on the night in question. Hegel cannot (I am being absolutist in this statement) mean that because the night is dark "all cows are black".

    Why do I say he can't mean this? He can admit that he means it; but then he would be admitting that the absence of light is a thing in itself rather than that it is the absence of a thing in itself. When the sun comes up, and the thing in itself is shining in the sky, he would see they are not all black--if in fact they are not.

    His statement is one of relativism. If the night is dark, the cows are black; if the sun is out, the cows might in fact be British White cows. The absolute fact remains that the same standard must be applied to cows in the dark as to cows in the light. If I said, "It's so dark I can't see my hand in front of my face, therefore I do not have a hand", you would think I was being ridiculous. Hegel is being ridiculous.

    Absolutism simply means that a thing is what it is, and sometimes it requires daylight to see it. If Hegel had known about night-vision goggles, he could not have made that statement except by including the reference that no one was wearing them. That alone demonstrates relativism.

    It requires microscopes to see viruses, and apparently it takes 'gamers' to bring the microscopic vision into 3 dimensions. That is 'absolutely' the way it happened, and you can't say that turning off the lights would have made any difference in either fact. You don't need light to see a computer screen. If the gamers had not solved the puzzle, you can say "Absolutely the gamers did not solve the puzzle." What is so difficult to understand about that? http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/online-gam...

    A=A is an absolutist statement that is not meant to be a tautology. Take the gamers and plug them into Aristotle's statement: Gamers (A) solved (=) the puzzle (A). The "A" on each side is not meant to mean the same thing; they are meant to represent two things which have an absolute connection.

    "[A] tautology doesn't mean that one side of the proposition looks like the other side. For example "Existence exists" is often called a tautology. But it isn't. Let's start with the definition of "tautology":

    "Repetition of the same sense is tautology. Repetition of the same sound is tautophony." http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/tautolt%E2%80%A6

    Your statement that absolutism may 'wear down' science makes no sense. Without being able to say with absolute certainty that "This gene does such-and-such" we could not be using gene therapy to produce medical results. As a matter of fact, you could not state with certainty what your name is, or that you are a human, because both statements require absolutist thoughts.

  • Anonymous
    10 years ago

    That sounds just like the same subjective bias that Donkey was referencing above.

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