On 6/15/2014 1:30 PM, None wrote:
"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
"None" wrote in message
...
"Gary Eickmeier" wrote in message
...
The phenomenon was all summed up by Arthur Schopenhauer:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.
Facile and glib, but nonsense. Certainly, not all truth is ridiculed
and violently opposed. That's the most nonsensical part of it. And
when there is opposition, it's rarely violent.
He's using "violent" metaphorically. As when None violently opposes
the truthful things I say.
If I opposed you violently, you'd know about it. But unlike you, I have
no intention of taking anything to real life with you. People who try to
go RL with Usenet disagreements (as you seem to want to do) are
frequently unhinged.
It's a convenient but non-too-clever catch phrase, and very popular
with cranks, of course. Perhaps the most ridiculous usage is the way
you have used it: the notion that ridicule and opposition are somehow
evidence of truth. That's probably why it's so popular with cranks.
Has it ever occurred to you that it serves the purpose of (hopefully)
making people think about what they believe, and why? Oh, wait... You
don't think.
It turns out this observation is actually a paraphrase of what
Schopenhauer actually said:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/att...s-of-truth.897
"To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the
two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or
disparaged as trivial."
Yeah, that's likely why cranks misquote him. They're probably just
parroting other cranks with cut-and-paste, anyway.
I'm surprised this cite hasn't shown up yet:
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/stages.pdf
along with this quote from the paper:
~~
"This dubious Schopenhauer citation has been used
to support non-mainstream or controversial views on
such diverse topics as the feelings of fish [3],
megadose vitamin C therapy [32], drug legalization[25],
network marketing [12], acupuncture [33], supranational
government [24], repressed memory [28], libertarianism [35],
anti-vaccination [9], and human cloning [23]. It has even
been cited in a court case in Florida [18].
A common feature of all these citations is the lack of
any reference to where in Schopenhauer's work the quotation
can be found."
~~
==
Later...
Ron Capik cynic-in-training
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