On Walking to the Door

Like Alex, I've been getting pretty frustrated with the Stoics, especially with their metaphysics. There are a ton of things you can reason successfully about. Still, these guys never seem to get enough, and they continue to reason about experience--working backwards. It can't be done. 

'if there is something in the world which human reason, strength and power are incapable of producing, that which produces it must be better than man. But the heavens and everything that, which display unceasing regularity cannot be produced by man. Therefore that by which those things are produced is better than man. And what name rather than God would you give to this?'

I wouldn't give it a name. Sure, you can understand an experience of strength or power but that is completely different. Understanding just puts labels on everything so your brain can file it neatly away. That color you're seeing? Yellow. The shape? Curved. The curved yellow thing? Banana. Check. Everything you know about bananas, you know because you had an experience and you understood; what more could reason possibly tell you beyond that? If you're trying to get to the 'essence' of the banana, its 'ultimate reality', then enjoy your aneurysm. 

For the Stoics, A man is a creature who possesses the capacity to see connections as a natural endowment. The whole world is the work of immanent logic, and in his power of articulate thought man is supposed to have the means to formulate statements that mirror cosmic events. That is an attractive notion. More, I like it. Few contemporary philosophers offer us such sweeping visions of our world and ourselves; few have the courage to reach as far or as wide. But the Stoics think they can reason there way to anything. "The world has no beginning-- otherwise, there would have been nothing to start it!" Yeah, that makes sense--wait  a second. What? "The world had a beginning-- and infinite regress is impossible!" Both of those seem reasonable, since we can't experience either. That's exactly the sort of dialectic crap that ruins it for me. Time and space don't belong to reason. You're better off watching Carl Sagan videos on Youtube. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxlPVSAnWOo