PRATICAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE EVERY-DAY VIKING
What is philosophy? It has been many things to many men throughout the ages, but if you said it is presently a system used by emasculated college professors to justify failure and weakness you would be right. Philosophy, like many once great enterprises (like music, micro brewing, and democracy) has been taken over by metrosexuals and perverted into a threat to society itself. This was not always so. There was once a time when men where men and greatness was greatness. That time was the golden age of Athens.
It was in this civilization that men such as Pericles achieved excellence and greatness. One can tell much of a epoch by learning of the men it produced… and fewer were greater than the man called Socrates. Socrates was a philosopher. If Socrates was as great as I have said then the philosophy of his day has to be different from the abomination that is modern academic philosophy. So what was philosophy in this age? Here is a small story that will answer that question:
One day Socrates and a few other men were in the agora discussing the meaning of righteousness. In the midst of their conversation a young man approached and asked Socrates if he could become a student and learn philosophy as well. Socrates then grabbed the fellow by his hair and dunked his head under water in a nearby fountain. The young man struggled violently as he believed that Socrates meant to drown him. And just as soon as he began to lose consciousness Socrates pulled his head up into the Athens air. Then Socrates told him that when he was prepared to fight as hard for the truth as he was for his next breath then he could come back and become a philosopher. That young man was Plato.
Now if you cannot recognize the unapologetic manliness of this story then you might as well just start listening to Death Cab now, because you are lost to the cause of masculinity. And that is not the only story that illustrates the manliness of Socrates. I could tell you about how he never left the city of Athens except when he went to war on three separate occasions… he was a legit war hero… keeping his unit together at the battle of Delium. There is just something that screams Viking about a man whose only experience of foreigners was an attempt to kill them. Or I could tell you about how he knocked up his wife three times not because he liked sex or wanted children but just so he could put her through the pain of childbirth three times. Ok that one might not be true but everything else is.
However, I have only told you of a philosopher and not what philosophy is. There is a great deal of debate about the nature of philosophy but I will give you the simplest and most accepted definition. The Greek root words that became the word philosophy (philein and sophia) mean to love wisdom. That is what philosophy is, the love of wisdom. This has great bearing on the enterprise of manliness. Homo sapien literally translates to wise man. Wisdom (specifically rationality) is the fundamental defining characteristic of man. That thing which distinguishes we men from every other animal (and women) is our unique ability to separate our passions from our judgment and see the likely consequences of our actions so as to act more wisely. You might even say philosophy then is the love of manliness.
So if you are the man you claim.. you should listen well. If you hold your manliness dear, then it is necessary for you to uphold basic standards of rationality in your arguments. You do not need to know advanced symbolic logic but you should know the basics of argument. This I can teach in about thirty seconds. The most basic and common form of argument is the syllogism. It works thusly: two statements and a conclusion that is claimed to follow from the premises. So it might work like this
P1: All Vikings love raping and pillaging.
P2: Ragnar Lodbrok is a Viking.
C: Ragnar Lodbrok loves raping and pillaging.
This is what is called deductive logic, this means that if your two premises are true then your conclusion MUST be true as it is simply included in the premises. What is important to remember is that in these kind of arguments what really matters is whether the premises are true because the truth of the conclusion is just a function of the truth of the premises.
Simple enough right? Maybe not, to you inferior metrosexual pussies, but to a Viking philosopher like me this stuff is self-evident. But this article is not about teaching logic it is about proper manly philosophy of which logic is only a small part. If you want to learn more about the power that is logic I suggest this as a start.
http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/very-basic-terms-of-logic-6816.html
Fair warning this thread is about the only good one on those forums, that place is dominated (simply because I am busy dominating other important things) by the modern pussy philosophers you were warned against earlier.
Logic is but a part of philosophy, there are many other fields within it. There is metaphysics which is the study of the nature of reality (more or less) and epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and knowing. These things are far too esoteric and complicated for the majority of you, so suffice to say they are best left to men like me already in the ivory tower of academia. There are many pussies in philosophy departments right now advocating all sorts of idiotic shit in these fields but once the baby boomers (evil hippie generation for those of you ignorant of history, that is to say all of you) start dying off we can take back the schools.
The rest of this article is going to concern itself with ethics, the sub field of philosophy that deals with the rightness or wrongness of human behavior, which is why it is sometimes called moral philosophy. The question of ethics is the fundamental question of philosophy: What should you as a man do? This question is complicated to answer but I can give you definite proof of one thing you should do.
I shall show you why you should join the Viking Forum here at The Hall based on the classical notion of friendship.
Friendship in the days of Athenian manliness was defined as men with mutual admiration of virtue, this means friendship was a path to self-improvement or no friendship at all. If you and your so-called friends do not possess virtue then you are not friends at all, but a conspiracy of weakness. In the days of Socrates they believed in four virtues
1. Self discipline-means letting your head rule your appetites and passions
2. Courage-means the knowledge of what is and what is not to be feared (death is not to be feared, if you want to know why ask me on the Viking Forum)
3. Wisdom-means making good decisions
4. Justice-is the harmony of the other three virtues in the man
So I might have great wisdom, but my friend has great courage. I would admire and try to bring my courage to his level, while he would do the same with my wisdom. This is how the relationships between proper men work.
Note that the English word virtue comes from the Latin virtus, which means manliness. In other words, virtues are the qualities proper to a man. So where better to go to learn manly virtue then Arthurs Hall of Viking Manliness? That’s right, there is no better place. Your mere presence in The Hall will improve your manliness, and eventually we can even destroy the artificial guilt society has given you for being dominant, and you can cast off your shackles and become the man nature wants you to be (and women want to bang).
There you have it, as a man your primary ethical concern is becoming a better man, and we can teach that. So turn off the Korn, put on some fucking Slayer, get in the squat rack, chew some Redman and get your ass posting!
-Bill Kephart
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