User:John Bessa/Reason Vs Sense

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This is at the moment a scratch page. As the material gels, and I can form a structure, I will move the scratch material to Reason_Vs_Sense/Scratch.

It seemed to be finished as I expanded my research from the Wictionary  into an artcile by the same name on OpEdNews when I started looking further at a Greek connection to Roman ratio and sense. I found little connecting Greece to sense, but landed squarely in the what I now know is the initiating camp of capital while following up on "logos," the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle circle. My only book on the topic these early teachers is IF Stone's The Trial of Socrates, which paints an excellent background for the creation of Western society. Stone, as a Libertarian, shows us that this circle was largely Libertarian, and even tells us that freedom is rational for taking others' freedoms, all in a single paragraph, but fails to make the connections that tell us why our freedom-based culture cyclically fails.

My approach has been a mono-diet of empathy, or emotional communication, fortified by the Sciene of empathic neurological constructs. Perhaps this neurological knowledge is necessary to empirically define why the removal of the ancient empire-based structure that is killing is so necessary, with the restoration of the natural community, tribal, family-based culture that successfully brought us here. Otherwise, the empathic tendency, stupidly based on rational thought processes, is to extend freedom everywhere, almost as a religious belief, even if these freedoms are used to take away freedoms of democracy to install fascism. The school, of course, opposed Athenian democracy, supporting instead oligarchy such as the Spartans had. Even after Sparta attacked the school, most of its pupils and teachers still supported oligarchy.

I call oligarchy fascism here because Rome, with its capital can colonial structure, is the real connection. Greece, in contrast, seems to have followed a tribal model which allowed it to preserve individual freedoms, no matter how malignant. Stone shows that the Holy Roman inquisition was actually designed at the school; the concept laid dormant for so many years, and was revived during the Roman Church's Platonic (and anti-Aristotle) period. They made the pagan Plato one of their own!

What is most important, that the majority of humans think normally; that our thoughts are based on experiences--sensed, learned, and remembered--and that the purely rational approach is for the few that lack the neural links between sense and thought, as we see in Plato's cave model. Plato's isolated thought is the model for dominant thought, and cannot easily be dislodged because the natural sensually connected thought tends to the peaceful path of least resistance.

But still, much as Christ taught, the path (a derivation of the roots of the term sense as you will see) will always be peace and love, if for no other reason than to mitigate the dangerous paranoia resulting from the ruinous mistakes that result from the continually risk-vs-benefit ratio calculations of the purely rational.

(If we are going to use Christ's parables as a model, then we have to do so fundamentally--but not in the sense of the Calvinists! There is no understating the damages of Holy Roman Capital, or the conflicts of the Reformation. In no case did any of those people do what Christ would have done.)

=Scratch Material=

From Old French rationel, rational < Latin rationalis (“‘of or belonging to reason, rational, reasonable’”) < ratio (“‘reason’”)

The term historically initiates with the latin "ratio," where "rat-" means thought. The ratio article here also shows "calculation" as a translation for the Latin noun, and hence the line should read:

From Old French rationel, rational < Latin rationalis (“‘of or belonging to reason, rational, reasonable’”) < ratio (“‘reason or calculation’”)

Interestingly, the English part of the page shows ratio used entirely in mathematical terms or as a legal term, which supports including "calculation" in the above line. Judaical decisions are, in a sense, calculations; often they are political calculations. I have read a judicial opinion that separated "rational" from "right and wrong," where an argument simply needs to be rationalized to be judicially supported. This was a State of Rhode Island court decision to uphold a police department's desire to hire only candidates who had low scores on an intelligence exam. It seems that the judge was be calculating a decision based on a finite set of ideas before him, which brings to mind the legal use of the term. The decision would seem absurd, as a stupid police department would create a clear channel for crime and corruption. The definition shows rational as meaning "not absurd," but the Judge's rational decision in this case is absurd!

From common use, the English word "ration" would, on the surface, to appear to be derived from math; a ration as a portion, or ratio, of an under-supplied resource such as food or gasoline. English "ration" derives from from the French word of the same spelling, which, in turn, derives from the accusative singular of Latin ratiō, which brings us back to "calculation." The English "reason," which is usually associated with rationality, likewise comes to us from the French: "raison." This French word, in turn, comes to us from the Latin "rationem," again an accusative of the Latin "ratiō."

There is an interesting nuance about the Roman use of the word that implies that Roman thought was calculating, what I would think of as Machiavellian. And Roman history would support this! But we know healthy thought to be a mixture of different kinds of thought components including emotion, imagination, analysis, and conceptual construction. And we know that the facilities that support this various kinds of thought components come to us through evolution, so we know that they existed before Roman times! I wonder if there is another Latin term for thought that is more emotional or creative, or if Romans simply did not think in these "modern" ways. If so, I wonder how the use this term in modern language has influenced modern schools of thought such as we find in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. My gut sense is that there were Roman terms for the different components of thought, and that ratiō actually refers only to calculating thought. I am looking hard for examples to support this above hypothesis.

I looked further, and found my gut sense to be correct. My first guess from common language that compares rational and reasonable brought me to the same Latin ratiō, which leans towards the calculating and mathematical. But saying that Romans thought purely mathematically would be biased as that would make them like no others, so I took another synonym of reasonable: sensible. This brought me to the other components of thought that I mentioned above.

The path to wiktionary references went thus:

sensible > Latin sentire or sentio > Lithuanian sintėti > Proto-Indo-European *sent- (“to head for, go")

Rome did not have a native word to describe this "flip side" of thought, so presumably Romans used Northern European-based words.

Definitions from wide-spread languages group closely giving an impression of seeking, which implies travel and absorbtion, in contrast to calculating, which is stationary and introverted:


 * to head for
 * to go
 * to think
 * to desire
 * path
 * way

Spanish sensible is actually referred to as a false friend to reasonable, further widening the gap.

It would likewise be biased to say that unrelated cultures don't have these language components. Zen gives us a clue with the idea of "thinking with no mind," in other words, without preconception almost like RADAR. The impression I got of this Zen approach (usually to violence) is that calculation happens in a Samurai's mind as information is "acquired," giving a machine-like response, but the incoming information is really sensed, and hence "felt" further supporting the above progression. The Samurai's response is hence empathic rather than calculating, as described by "no-sword technique" in the Life-giving Sword.

Other relevant pages I went to: etymonline, sensible vs. reasonable (last entry raises questions), Tocharian (root language for sensible)

This example of well-developed "sense" comes of course from the easternmost island nation, Japan. Interestingly, the terms path and way, concepts associated with Buddhism, come from the westernmost island of Ireland.

Other relevant pages I went to:etymonline, writing about reason and faith (last entry raises relevant questions),Tocharian(root language for sensible)

This writing resulted, ultimately, from a conflict. I don't mention the whole situation in the introduction, but perhaps I need to tell you that I know the "rationalist," as I think of him, from the Wikiversity, which is a subset of the Wikipedia. His interactions with others are purely negative, and he erases others' good writing; he is predatory. He is not alone; he is a type of person that is not unique--especially on the Wikipedia and the Internet in general. He is not critical; he is destructive.

His rationalization of his absurd statement prompted me to look further in the nature of rationalization, a short journey that brought me to the evolution of the meanings of classical words. I picked up one of my books describing the classical ages, IF Stone's The Trial of Socrates, and found a succinct description the mess of rationalizations and contradictions that formed the basis for structuring Western society. Interestingly I recognized modern Libertarianism in Stone's description of Plato's and Socrates's circle of philosophers, and quickly understood the Athenian's anger who would promote totalitarianism as a freedom. Obviously the powerful Romans owed their successes to the Greek structure they copied, and even more interesting, the Holy Roman Inquisition was architected by one of this circle.

The Wikipeidia, and the Wikiversity with it, is dominated by Libertarians who have a vast toolkit to maintain dominance has been adapted to the Web. The structure and symbolism of the Wikipedia is strongly influenced by these philosophers, though I believe that the strongest influence is Capital, which is purely Roman.

From any perspective, however, we see in the Internet, our newest component of the Information Society plagued with the disorder that ancient empires experienced as they attempted to organized their capital structures. Ironically this is presented to us in the form of radicalization as if the strategy of using freedom and free speech to implement control specifically to take away freedom is something new.

When I realized that I could see the roots of contemporary conflict, however trivial, in the Imperial societies as actual identifiable forms of mental illness that can be shown to be neurologically based, I realized that my last few years of research can conclude. Rational thought, as a a subset of general thought, which is described in terms of sense, at a certain point replaced general thought, perhaps what can be described as common sense. And the people who replaced common sense with rational thought, clearly cannot think clearly.

Certainly math is necessary as a component of thought, but the idea that calculation can actually replace sensibility is the result of a mass of thinking disorders.

Where this brings us with respect to the mass of capital structure that has grown from the Greek "polis" is a very good question, but I think that with the development of new ideas based on empathic concepts, such as Constructivism, we can guide ourselves away from the crash-course with destruction that we were put on so long ago. But we have to be realistic; sympathy with these specific types of mentally illness should not include fulfilling obsessive needs for control and consumption, despite what the Greek philosophers, or other Imperialist debaters, may have said about freedom.

It is biased to think that only these philosophers spun these control structures; all societies react in similar ways to similar situations. Very likely we see this debate in the Asian empires.