The Japanese culture during the Age of the Samurai created an understanding of how anything that might at first come across as a 'mere opinion' could be proven true beyond any possibly of further doubt even by the opinion's greatest, most firmly deluded 'skeptic'.
They called it, "The Truth of the Sword". As you might imagine, the term was shaped by how the Samurai invariably settled any dispute about reality that reached a point where two people both thought it was necessary to fight to the death in order for both of them to hold anything in the way of being compatible views about it.
There's more.
What I've said comes no closer than setting the stage. To be given a chance at a honest understanding of 'The Truth of the Sword', you should think about it's exact origins.
Originally, it was limited to examples of warriors arguing, on the theoretical level, about which one of them was practicing the sounder and more realistic technique for killing someone in battle who was using a different technique to try to kill them first.
In short, 'The Truth of the Sword' was a practical way of testing competing theories about reality.
It was most likely intended to test the sincerity and conviction of the men on both sides of the battle. That would amount to a test of their personal integrity and honor in far more cultures than merely Japan's. But to the Japanese of the time, that would have been an incidental outcome or by product of the test, and not its main point.
I've never studied another culture so determined as the Japanese were (most likely still are) to root their notions of self-worth in observable reality. They took that to extremes any outsider would need to get lucky guessing at to have a chance of suspecting them.
The way of thinking that allowed my second wife to sincerely believe no man was the best a man could be at being human who could not compose even one poem that proved he understood the world and his life well enough to grasp how precious life was for him -- her way of thinking about that is exactly in line with the Japanese demand that self-worth be firmly grounded in reality.
If you're curious, the 'death poems' people wrote as their last act before committing ritual suicide were usually meant to be proof that anyone might see, if they knew how to see it, that the man who died that day knew what a precious gift life had been to him.
To your best understanding, what is the practical and logical significance of 'The Truth of the Sword' to the question of whether things that come across as mere opinions might be ranked differently one from another in terms of how realistic or well grounded in fact they are?
Please bear in mind that no human is completely free of some sort of self-delusional thinking, except most likely a very of us who are akin to Zen monks, or mystics in general, on their best days. Thus, anyone posting here (or anywhere) sounding like someone who is convinced he or she knows for certain something they cannot be reasonably certain of actually knowing it is going to come across to me as nothing more interesting than a lack of self-awareness. Almost any and all of the ways humans can lack of self-awareness are as commonplace daily events as grains of rice are interchangeable. I bet it will come across that way to some others, too.
Thank you for whatever patience you have in you for cranky old men doing their thing by being cranky about humanity's greatest yet Age of Lies.
Gods, I love this woman's skills.
They called it, "The Truth of the Sword". As you might imagine, the term was shaped by how the Samurai invariably settled any dispute about reality that reached a point where two people both thought it was necessary to fight to the death in order for both of them to hold anything in the way of being compatible views about it.
There's more.
What I've said comes no closer than setting the stage. To be given a chance at a honest understanding of 'The Truth of the Sword', you should think about it's exact origins.
Originally, it was limited to examples of warriors arguing, on the theoretical level, about which one of them was practicing the sounder and more realistic technique for killing someone in battle who was using a different technique to try to kill them first.
In short, 'The Truth of the Sword' was a practical way of testing competing theories about reality.
It was most likely intended to test the sincerity and conviction of the men on both sides of the battle. That would amount to a test of their personal integrity and honor in far more cultures than merely Japan's. But to the Japanese of the time, that would have been an incidental outcome or by product of the test, and not its main point.
I've never studied another culture so determined as the Japanese were (most likely still are) to root their notions of self-worth in observable reality. They took that to extremes any outsider would need to get lucky guessing at to have a chance of suspecting them.
The way of thinking that allowed my second wife to sincerely believe no man was the best a man could be at being human who could not compose even one poem that proved he understood the world and his life well enough to grasp how precious life was for him -- her way of thinking about that is exactly in line with the Japanese demand that self-worth be firmly grounded in reality.
If you're curious, the 'death poems' people wrote as their last act before committing ritual suicide were usually meant to be proof that anyone might see, if they knew how to see it, that the man who died that day knew what a precious gift life had been to him.
To your best understanding, what is the practical and logical significance of 'The Truth of the Sword' to the question of whether things that come across as mere opinions might be ranked differently one from another in terms of how realistic or well grounded in fact they are?
Please bear in mind that no human is completely free of some sort of self-delusional thinking, except most likely a very of us who are akin to Zen monks, or mystics in general, on their best days. Thus, anyone posting here (or anywhere) sounding like someone who is convinced he or she knows for certain something they cannot be reasonably certain of actually knowing it is going to come across to me as nothing more interesting than a lack of self-awareness. Almost any and all of the ways humans can lack of self-awareness are as commonplace daily events as grains of rice are interchangeable. I bet it will come across that way to some others, too.
Thank you for whatever patience you have in you for cranky old men doing their thing by being cranky about humanity's greatest yet Age of Lies.
Gods, I love this woman's skills.
