Why the sudden appearance of Solipsism?

[blase6]

If you know nothing about them you have no reason for thinking loving them will make any difference at all.

By the way, “loving” them out of a hope they won’t hurt you is not loving them out of genuine concern for their well-being, but out of concern for your own. It is self-interest. That might give them another reason to hurt you.

My point is that you CANNOT truly love another as other unless you sincerely believe, in a completely certain and unqualified sense, that they exist as OTHER.

So your solipsism makes the kind of love God expects of us logically impossible.

Perhaps you need to rethink this.

I try all the time to rethink it. I don’t get anywhere. My reasons for solipsism are perfectly reasonable. I am tired of being forced to try to accept things only because they are more reasonable than other possibilities. I want absolute certainty. But it can’t be found almost anywhere.

 

[blase6]

Love isn’t a reasoned response. It doesn’t have a bullet list of requirements. It’s an emotional one. Its born of memories, and experiences, and hopes, and fears. It’s born of life. It’s born because the soul yearns for companionship, and so it disregards reason. Love doesn’t care about reason. Love is the suspension of reason.

In fact a solipsist would argue that it’s you who can’t love. It’s you who must be indifferent. For love is greatest when we fear that it might be lost. When a parent sits at the bedside of an ill child, it’s then that they feel their love the deepest. It’s then that they pray the hardest. And so the solipsist treasures everything, not because he’s certain of them, but because he isn’t. You on the other hand must treasure practically nothing, because to you the world is assured, irrefutable, and mundane. Who loves the most? The solipsist does, because he’s assured of nothing, and so he treasures everything.

Another poor definition of love.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . You on the other hand must treasure practically nothing, because to you the world is assured, irrefutable, and mundane. . .

Huh? Doesn’t sound like Pete to me.

By love, what is meant is Charity:

CCC
1822 Charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.
1823 Jesus makes charity the new commandment. By loving his own “to the end,” he makes manifest the Father’s love which he receives. By loving one another, the disciples imitate the love of Jesus which they themselves receive. Whence Jesus says: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love.” And again: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
1824 Fruit of the Spirit and fullness of the Law, charity keeps the commandments of God and his Christ: “Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”
1825 Christ died out of love for us, while we were still “enemies.” The Lord asks us to love as he does, even our enemies, to make ourselves the neighbor of those farthest away, and to love children and the poor as Christ himself.
The Apostle Paul has given an incomparable depiction of charity: “charity is patient and kind, charity is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Charity does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Charity bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
1826 “If I . . . have not charity,” says the Apostle, “I am nothing.” Whatever my privilege, service, or even virtue, “if I . . . have not charity, I gain nothing.” Charity is superior to all the virtues. It is the first of the theological virtues: “So faith, hope, charity abide, these three. But the greatest of these is charity.”
1827 The practice of all the virtues is animated and inspired by charity, which “binds everything together in perfect harmony”; it is the form of the virtues; it articulates and orders them among themselves; it is the source and the goal of their Christian practice. Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love.
1828 The practice of the moral life animated by charity gives to the Christian the spiritual freedom of the children of God. He no longer stands before God as a slave, in servile fear, or as a mercenary looking for wages, but as a son responding to the love of him who “first loved us”:
If we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages, . . . we resemble mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love for him who commands . . . we are in the position of children.
1829 The fruits of charity are joy, peace, and mercy; charity demands beneficence and fraternal correction; it is benevolence; it fosters reciprocity and remains disinterested and generous; it is friendship and communion: Love is itself the fulfillment of all our works. There is the goal; that is why we run: we run toward it, and once we reach it, in it we shall find rest

 

[Bahman]

Love isn’t a reasoned response. It doesn’t have a bullet list of requirements. It’s an emotional one. Its born of memories, and experiences, and hopes, and fears. It’s born of life. It’s born because the soul yearns for companionship, and so it disregards reason. Love doesn’t care about reason. Love is the suspension of reason.

In fact a solipsist would argue that it’s you who can’t love. It’s you who must be indifferent. For love is greatest when we fear that it might be lost. When a parent sits at the bedside of an ill child, it’s then that they feel their love the deepest. It’s then that they pray the hardest. And so the solipsist treasures everything, not because he’s certain of them, but because he isn’t. You on the other hand must treasure practically nothing, because to you the world is assured, irrefutable, and mundane. Who loves the most? The solipsist does, because he’s assured of nothing, and so he treasures everything.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Love isn’t a reasoned response. It doesn’t have a bullet list of requirements. It’s an emotional one. Its born of memories, and experiences, and hopes, and fears. It’s born of life. It’s born because the soul yearns for companionship, and so it disregards reason. Love doesn’t care about reason. Love is the suspension of reason.

In fact a solipsist would argue that it’s you who can’t love. It’s you who must be indifferent. For love is greatest when we fear that it might be lost. When a parent sits at the bedside of an ill child, it’s then that they feel their love the deepest. It’s then that they pray the hardest. And so the solipsist treasures everything, not because he’s certain of them, but because he isn’t. You on the other hand must treasure practically nothing, because to you the world is assured, irrefutable, and mundane. Who loves the most? The solipsist does, because he’s assured of nothing, and so he treasures everything.

I am not sure how any of this has anything at all to do with solipsism. You may as well argue that love is not possible except to an egoist because an egoist is completely absorbed in him/herself and therefore has everything to lose – their egoism and self-absorption if they dare to care for someone other than themself.

That may or may not be true, but what is clear is that the egoist must recognize that the well-being of other, as other, merits their love and requires them to abandon their egoism before love is even possible. So, an egoist/solipsist must abandon their egoism/solipsism in order to love other as other. There is no way around that. They have to allow that OTHER person they love INTO their world. Which means solipsism is thereby ruptured.

Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus himself, emptied himself of his divinity in order to become man. He also died on the cross and thereby showed a willingness to lose himself completely for the love of other.

**By definition, solipsism – the belief that the existence of anything or anyone outside of oneself is uncertain – is a defeater to love and love is a defeater for solipsism. I am not clear how ANYONE could see it otherwise. To love others, you simply have to think they have substantial existence outside of your existence and independent of you.
**
What you seem to be talking about is loving others for the sake of oneself, but that isn’t what agape or the kind of love Jesus says is necessary to be love is. It is loving others for their sake and willing their good without reference to our own but for their sake alone.

You seem to want to tie love to the feelings and meaningfulness it creates in the one who loves. I think that isn’t it. Love doesn’t exclude or preclude those, but it doesn’t stop there. Love is willing to sacrifice for the good of the other as other, not restrict itself to the benefits that accrue to oneself. It means knowing that the other is worthy of love to the extent that a sacrifice of oneself – a losing of oneself – for their sake can be warranted. It is not possible to love what you don’t know.

Ergo, if solipsism means complete uncertainty that others exist, love becomes impossible because you can’t love others for their sake nor unconditionally if you can’t even know or trust who or what others are with any degree of certainty. Love becomes a variation on the theme of egoism and nothing more – a far cry from the Christian understanding of love.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Another poor definition of love.

On this we agree.

 

[Peter_Plato]

For love is greatest when we fear that it might be lost.

This is, I think, the most problematic of everything you said.

What it highlights is the emotional dependency between the lover and the beloved. The problem is: if loss to oneself rather than loss of the good of the other is what is most feared, then we will do anything to prevent that loss. That is where jealousy or possessiveness becomes mistaken for love.

For love to be pure, it is the good of the other, for its own sake, that is desired, independent of any benefits to oneself.

That is why Christian love means loving one’s enemy, which wouldn’t make sense in terms of “love is greatest when we fear that it might be lost” because an enemy is precisely one who has deliberately caused a rupture in the emotional connection YOU call love – the enemy has precisely brought about the loss of what was most feared. What then? Love, for you, would be lost right at that point. What then? How would a lover respond to the loss of what you claim is the requited nature necessary for love to exist? Loving enemies would seem impossible on your view, since what has been “most feared” has come about. What is left, but loss of love. Ergo love of enemies is not possible according to your own paradigm.

Do you have an answer?

 

[Partinobodycula]

Do you have an answer?

Yesterday or the day before a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by ISIS. The initial response is to feel empathy for the pilot, and anger toward those who killed him. This is true even for me. But the solipsist in me realizes that these things are part of life, and if I wish to know its glories, I must accept its horrors as well. Because we understand the beauty of one, only when it’s opposed to the ugliness of the other. It’s only in knowing darkness that one can appreciate the light.

And so I love everything, for without the ugliness of one, I lose the beauty of the other, I have nothing.

 

[Bahman]

Yesterday or the day before a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by ISIS. The initial response is to feel empathy for the pilot, and anger toward those who killed him. This is true even for me. But the solipsist in me realizes that these things are part of life, and if I wish to know its glories, I must accept its horrors as well. Because we understand the beauty of one, only when it’s opposed to the ugliness of the other. It’s only in knowing darkness that one can appreciate the light.

And so I love everything, for without the ugliness of one, I lose the beauty of the other, I have nothing.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Yesterday or the day before a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by ISIS. The initial response is to feel empathy for the pilot, and anger toward those who killed him. This is true even for me. But the solipsist in me realizes that these things are part of life, and if I wish to know its glories, I must accept its horrors as well. Because we understand the beauty of one, only when it’s opposed to the ugliness of the other. It’s only in knowing darkness that one can appreciate the light.

And so I love everything, for without the ugliness of one, I lose the beauty of the other, I have nothing.

So to really appreciate the value of the person you love in front of you, you ought to kill them or leave them otherwise you can’t fully see their value? I don’t buy it.

We know beauty, truth and goodness, NOT BECAUSE we can grasp what it means NOT to have them, but rather because fullness of Being (the Light that shines in the darkness) makes HIMSELF available to us.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

We don’t need darkness to see the Light. We need light to know we are in darkness.

The point of Plato’s Cave is that shadows were revealed by the light. It isn’t that light was revealed by the shadows.

We don’t need shadows to see light.

Nor to see by the Light of Truth.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Yesterday or the day before a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by ISIS. The initial response is to feel empathy for the pilot, and anger toward those who killed him. This is true even for me. But the solipsist in me realizes that these things are part of life, and if I wish to know its glories, I must accept its horrors as well. Because we understand the beauty of one, only when it’s opposed to the ugliness of the other. It’s only in knowing darkness that one can appreciate the light.

Satan is the Prince of Darkness who never appreciates the Light.

That is why we have to beware of loving the Darkness.

 

[CrossofChrist]

A Muslim will say yes. The reason is because faith is assenting to revealed truth because of the authority of God who reveals. Now, assuming I have correctly understood Muslim teaching, both recognizing that it is God who reveals and assenting to the revealed truths are possible only by grace. So the certainty faith gives is supernatural.

Here are some articles using two different approaches that I’ve found rather helpful that go more in the direction I think you wanted to hear.

ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Jesus_Resurrection.htm

vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020824_ratzinger-cl-rimini_en.html

 

[CrossofChrist]

Yesterday or the day before a Jordanian pilot was burned to death by ISIS. The initial response is to feel empathy for the pilot, and anger toward those who killed him. This is true even for me. But the solipsist in me realizes that these things are part of life, and if I wish to know its glories, I must accept its horrors as well. Because we understand the beauty of one, only when it’s opposed to the ugliness of the other. It’s only in knowing darkness that one can appreciate the light.

And so I love everything, for without the ugliness of one, I lose the beauty of the other, I have nothing.

Is a love that can only rely on evil really be good? That’s a sad love to have, a love that can never overcome its antithesis. In any case, certainly that isn’t the Christian answer.

 

[blase6]

I am not sure how any of this has anything at all to do with solipsism. You may as well argue that love is not possible except to an egoist because an egoist is completely absorbed in him/herself and therefore has everything to lose – their egoism and self-absorption if they dare to care for someone other than themself.

That may or may not be true, but what is clear is that the egoist must recognize that the well-being of other, as other, merits their love and requires them to abandon their egoism before love is even possible. So, an egoist/solipsist must abandon their egoism/solipsism in order to love other as other. There is no way around that. They have to allow that OTHER person they love INTO their world. Which means solipsism is thereby ruptured.

Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus himself, emptied himself of his divinity in order to become man. He also died on the cross and thereby showed a willingness to lose himself completely for the love of other.

**By definition, solipsism – the belief that the existence of anything or anyone outside of oneself is uncertain – is a defeater to love and love is a defeater for solipsism. I am not clear how ANYONE could see it otherwise. To love others, you simply have to think they have substantial existence outside of your existence and independent of you.
**
What you seem to be talking about is loving others for the sake of oneself, but that isn’t what agape or the kind of love Jesus says is necessary to be love is. It is loving others for their sake and willing their good without reference to our own but for their sake alone.

You seem to want to tie love to the feelings and meaningfulness it creates in the one who loves. I think that isn’t it. Love doesn’t exclude or preclude those, but it doesn’t stop there. Love is willing to sacrifice for the good of the other as other, not restrict itself to the benefits that accrue to oneself. It means knowing that the other is worthy of love to the extent that a sacrifice of oneself – a losing of oneself – for their sake can be warranted. It is not possible to love what you don’t know.

Ergo, if solipsism means complete uncertainty that others exist, love becomes impossible because you can’t love others for their sake nor unconditionally if you can’t even know or trust who or what others are with any degree of certainty. Love becomes a variation on the theme of egoism and nothing more – a far cry from the Christian understanding of love.

I have actually come to a kind of “understanding” of love which is different from “loving others before yourself”. Not that my understanding of love doesn’t include that, but that isn’t the basic idea of love.

We say that God is Love. We also say that God is Being. (Even if I cannot know anything else about God certainly, I know being is real.) God is the simplest real being which precedes all other beings. Everything exists “within” God in a sense because God is the source of those things’ existence. So God loves all his creation, which means that he holds it in existence.

We believe that God created human beings as persons to participate in God’s being. So people who fully participate in God’s being are perfectly loving. People who are not perfectly loving are excluding God in some way and degree from themselves, which we call “selfishness”. I find this to be an imperfect description of a lack of love. A selfish person is acting irrationally, because they are making choices to the detriment of not only others, but themselves as well ultimately. Someone could be “selfish”, as in, focused on themselves, but with the wisdom which leads them to surrender to the will of God, understanding that God has better goods to offer them than a sinful life will bring.

I think that “love” isn’t so much what you do, as what you allow God to do within you. We just think of it as “putting others before yourself” because we are imperfect and cannot see why that ultimately is for our own good.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I think that “love” isn’t so much what you do, as what you allow God to do within you. We just think of it as “putting others before yourself” because we are imperfect and cannot see why that ultimately is for our own good.

This is why solipsism doesn’t make sense to me. How can you consistently “put others before yourself” if you are uncertain whether others even exist.

By the way I think stating it as putting others “before” yourself is awkward. I prefer "caring for the well-being of others as other or for their own sake. It isn’t a competition or either/or; it is both. It is recognizing the value of others for its own sake or that others are valuable in their own right not dependent on any necessary relationship to oneself.

 

[blase6]

This is why solipsism doesn’t make sense to me. How can you consistently “put others before yourself” if you are uncertain whether others even exist.

By the way I think stating it as putting others “before” yourself is awkward. I prefer "caring for the well-being of others as other or for their own sake. It isn’t a competition or either/or; it is both. It is recognizing the value of others for its own sake or that others are valuable in their own right not dependent on any necessary relationship to oneself.

You can be a loving solipsist if you recognize that at the very least, there is sufficient evidence that other people exist, that it would be recognized as prudent to not only treat others lovingly, but to even allow oneself to value others as if they were real.

Your description is a good summary.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

You can be a loving solipsist if you recognize that at the very least, there is sufficient evidence that other people exist, that it would be recognized as prudent to not only treat others lovingly, but to even allow oneself to value others as if they were real.

Your description is a good summary.

Why do you say only “sufficient evidence” rather than “objectively real” evidence?

If someone aims a gun at your head, is that only “sufficient evidence” that you should run, or is it objectively real evidence that you should run for your life?

At what point does the solipsist get caught up in uncommon nonsense rather than common sense?

 

[blase6]

Why do you say only “sufficient evidence” rather than “objectively real” evidence?

If someone aims a gun at your head, is that only “sufficient evidence” that you should run, or is it objectively real evidence that you should run for your life?

At what point does the solipsist get caught up in uncommon nonsense rather than common sense?

By “sufficient evidence” I mean “evidence that altogether supports a conjecture more that opposes it”.

Objectively real evidence is only evidence. It is not proof, even if it is reasonable to follow it.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

By “sufficient evidence” I mean “evidence that altogether supports a conjecture more that opposes it”.

Objectively real evidence is only evidence. It is not proof, even if it is reasonable to follow it.

So the gun aimed at your head is not proof?

 

[Linusthe2nd]

There are no valid arguments for Solipsism. For viewers who may have become confuesd I enclose the following from the First Vatican Council. It shows that God Almighty created a real world, knowable to the intelligent creatures he created. Is God a lier? The whole of Divine Revelation testifies to this.

THE VATICAN COUNCIL 1869-1870

Ecumenical XX (on Faith and the Church)

SESSION III (April 24, 1870)

Dogmatic Constitution concerning the Catholic Faith *

1781 But now, with the bishops of the whole world sitting and judging with us, gathered together in this Ecumenical Council by Our authority in the Holy Spirit, We, having relied on the Word of God, written and transmitted as We have received it, sacredly guarded and accurately explained by the Catholic Church, from this chair of PETER, in the sight of all, have determined to profess and to declare the salutary doctrine of Christ, after contrary errors have been proscribed and condemned by the power transmitted to Us by God.

Chap. 1. God, Creator of All Things

1782 [The one, living, and true God and His distinction from all things.] * The holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church believes and confesses that there is one, true, living God, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth, omnipotent, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in and will, and in every perfection; who, although He is one, singular, altogether simple and unchangeable spiritual substance, must be proclaimed distinct in reality and essence from the world; most blessed in Himself and of Himself, and ineffably most high above all things which are or can be conceived outside Himself [can. 1-4].

1783 The act of creation in itself, and in opposition to modern errors, and the effect of creation] . This sole true God by His goodness and “omnipotent power,” not to increase His own beatitude, and not to add to, but to manifest His perfection by the blessings which He bestows on creatures, with most free volition, “immediately from the beginning of time fashioned each creature out of nothing, spiritual and corporeal, namely angelic and mundane; and then the human creation, common as it were, composed of both spirit and body” [Lateran Council IV, see n. 428; can. 2 and 5]

1784 [The result of creation] .But God protects and governs by His providence all things which He created, “reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all things sweetly” [cf. Wisd. 8:1]. For “all things are naked and open to His eyes” Heb. 4:13], even those which by the free action of creatures are in the future.

Linus2nd

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