Professor Kevin Aho | A Philosophy of Absudity & Confronting Personal Truths

Natalie, your conversation with Kevin Aho about existentialism was incredibly enlightening! The idea of "trivializing the trivial" and focusing on what truly matters was so profound. I've sent you a DM on Instagram. Keep sharing these amazing insights! 🌟

In response to Søren Kierkegaard’s theory on personal despair. I see despair above all as an expression of powerlessness. You want things to be different from what they are or are going to be, but you don’t have the power to achieve that (fighting poverty or corruption, wanting to be a different person yourself, you name it). Or you want to understand something (e.g. our ‘being’, the origin of the universe, the mathematical code), but you have reached your intellectual ceiling. I don’t know if the struggle with that can eventually lead to becoming completely one with yourself, because I don’t know what that means, but in the end it’s all about learning to deal with it and accepting your own limitations, without getting bogged down in frustrations.

Our freedom, our free will, is in order for us to align ourselves with Reality. That is the purpose of the ego. The purpose of the ego is not to do everything stupid in existence as a way of exercising our free will egotistically and blindly to no purpose other than ego gratification.

56:11 what is your outlook on misdiagnosis of psychosis? This is depthful unimaginable experience bringing an individual to the barrier of breaking or folding, to be gentle about the severity.

We should have more people like this, who question. We would have a better world. Most people sleep walk through life. We should have time apart from our duties to spend on philosophy, even if it is not our career.   Philosophy is necessary for everyone who does not want to be just another member of the herd but instead contribute something positive. I am not a fan of the Existentialists, the way they lived their lives was not exactly praise worthy. We need something transcendent and absolute to set our boundaries, otherwise we are just egocentric bores. On the other hand ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’

What it means to be human... The Parmenidean principle that “all is one” goes much deeper than the paradoxical consequence Parmenides himself attached to it, namely that all claims of change or of non-Being are illogical. It also goes deeper than Heidegger’s existentialism which goes back to this principle. From a human perspective, this “oneness” refers to the earth and everything on it and in it. Over the centuries, man has slowly broken this unity. The consequences have been disastrous.

Why does pessimism exist as a structural phenomenon? Because we are born as human beings and die after a while. There is no intrinsic meaning attached to all that. Optimism in the sense intended here can only be derived by man from his own imagination. A fantasy with which he creates a “Hinterwelt” (Nietzsche). But the question remains how strongly man can continue to believe in his own fantasy.

Prof.Aho obviously hasn’t solved ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ If he had he would not make the claim ‘that God does not exist.’ It would be more accurate for him to say he does not BELIEVE that God exists. Without understanding Consciousness, what it is it is presumptuous and premature to say God does not exist.

Christ said it first: Die to yourself in order to live.

Glad that I never attended this man's classes