Thoughts from 05.02.2011:
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Where should any philosophical inquiry begin? Is the best path to think and write and analyze concepts and topics or is it to sit in quiet meditation and leave all attempts at linguistic symbols behind? Is writing anything helpful or is it all flawed and ultimately useless when trying to convey something about truth?
Does analysis of concepts and words yield anything other than more words and concepts? Is this an endless game of reference? Is meaning just pointing to other things where no grounds for such references can be determined to exist at all?
These are important questions and most of this website deals with at least a few of these questions. My attempt at looking at philosophy through analysis and exegesis of terms is simply something I enjoy doing. Herein I also add artistic expression and non-analytic thoughts as well as somewhat terse comments and realizations that may seem less than orderly.
Sometimes I number lines and paragraphs and sometimes I do not. I typically intend to number at least for reference and relation of sentences and paragraphs but this is one more tedious process of editing that, as this site expands, I find rather difficult to achieve in full.
Older thoughts from 2010:
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What is the point of philosophy? What is philosophy? Many find it a waste of time while others become virtually obsessed with the subject. I find myself in the latter category while I also find most humans to be in the former.
Love of wisdom, search for truth, fondness for contemplation, the desire to understand this place; all of these things seem to point to what philosophy is and hardly anyone can agree on what these searches can find or even how the investigation should actually begin or progress or come to some kind or any kind of an end.
At this point, I have no idea what this place is but I would love to know- though I don't know that such a thing can be known. Perhaps we can have proximal metaphysical knowledge or knowledge within certain limits. Maybe we can get a sketchy, foggy understanding of truth even if we can get no crisp, clear rendering of it.
If there are no absolute grounds and reality is infinitely embedded, as it certainly may be, there can be no end to the philosophical digging. The desire for truth will keep us drilling down into it forever. But, as we approach truth, we may, for principled reasons, never completely reach it but only get forever closer to it. As part of reality, how can we truly see ourselves within the reality we are part?
How can, in other words, the microscope see its sides, top, and base? How can it see the room it rests in? Are we so different? All it knows it what is on the slide and any suggestion to the contrary, should a microscope have a mind, would seem nonsensical and, perhaps, insane.
If the goal of philosophy is truth and wisdom, then failure and realization of error are both key in a process of determining what is right and what is not right to believe about reality.
There is often, but not necessarily, a vast chasm between many of those who live for philosophy and those who live from philosophy. This is true in all disciplines and one can find many professors who are more enamored with their degrees than the search for truth. Perhaps such longings and attempts at discovery are a waste of time for those who have tried or see impenetrable walls between our understanding and such objects of knowledge.
Ego and the arrogance of certainty, even possibly about uncertainty, then, is anathema to philosophy. Skepticism is important but should we not be skeptical of skepticism as well? Are there not possible things to be gained from abandoning skepticism, if only for a while, in order to see the results?
Philosophy is an exercise to show what is possible and what is reasonable. Existentialist philosophy's contribution may be to show that reason itself is unreasonable and that existence is the primary vantage point we should pay attention to.
Perhaps language and logic and reason do not really get us anywhere. But, when you abandon such things, you often become lost, confused, and stranded. While this experience of losing one's self in subjective meanderings can be worthwhile, it is easy to get lost and lose one's way back to sanity, order, reason, logic, and a degree of objectivity.
One ontological paradigm about reality is never enough to satisfy possibility. How can we measure one paradigm against the structure of reality without first knowing the structure of reality? How can we ever be sure our thoughts about this place are identical to "it", should there be a static version at all? What if it is dynamic, responsive, and influenced by our very beliefs about it?
To be enamored with a single paradigm is no different than religious faith- whether it be Nietzsche's will to power, Sartre's bad faith, Heidegger's Dasein, Plato's forms, Aristotle's metaphysics, Wittgenstein's language games, Fodor's concepts, Foucalt's power games, or Russel's positivism. They are all failed attempts because they attempt to frame, definitely and with borders, what exists. They are all right and all wrong at once.
I do think one view trumps all others. This is no new position and it has been mentioned and talked about since humans have contemplated number and being. That is the one view that there is no one view, but infinite views.
No human is capable of, at once, holding infinity in their representational field. But, this is the only true picture of nature. To grasp all paradigms, both found and undiscovered, would be to be god. It seems as though at least one of the infinite series of paradigms must be right, at some time, if there is anything here at all and there must be something here.
What it is, what reality is, is some thing or collection of things, and that is at least one thing, perhaps many, and that would have to be identical to at least one set of beliefs about it.
Nihilism and reductionist paradigms are neither beneficial to our psychological states as humans nor do I think they are true. But there is some truth in them. The idea that meaning is an illusion, no matter what this place is, is important to be aware of. Yet, we need not dwell on it and we can move on to infinite other ways of seeing ourselves.
Meaning can be seen as an event that is fleeting and present only given certain conditions requiring a mind with which to compare and interpret symbols. Perhaps when we die, there is no more meaning. Perhaps it continues because some form of interpretation continues beyond this physical form, this dream, this shared mind, or whatever this is.
That we are, in some way, at least empirically, a collection of particles- particles that are particles, ad infinitum, is no great depressing revelation to me because it is "1" way out of infinite ways to formulate our composition and nature. We are not just particles. We are particles arranged in such a way as to, at least in appearance, allow us to love. Perhaps love is pervasive in reality and in all things, but it also may be that most of it is cold and lifeless.
Perhaps all empirical science is an illusion, a toy, a mere passtime presented to us in order to think about it. Is it necessary that the empirical world, in terms of some proximal or absolute reality, is something more real than what is possibly underneath, what is possibly noumenal?
Simply because these realities may forever be beyond our comprehension does not mean they do not possibly exist in a way that is more fundamental and "solid" than the energy forms we encounter in everyday life or even at this or that quantum or cosmological level.
Science should be seen as an offshoot of philosophy in that it is the area where we try to make statements or observations about the world we live in. This division between philosophy and science has severely retarded our ability to progress in our epistemological understanding of the world.
Philosophy should be the expulsion of all hardened paradigms and religious-like thinking in which we begin to have faith in or certainty in certain patterns of thinking or ontological schemes.
The dynamic website is perhaps one of the most advanced and useful modes of expressing a philosophy because it is capable of dynamic and neverending correction and editing concerning the use of language to convey meaning. I can change what I learn is wrong. I can edit in just a few seconds, what was a bad or wrong thing to say or think.
Perhaps editions are useful for tracing changes of thought, but, thinking and philosophizing should be a project not a defense of a particular idolic paradigm made at a particular point in time.
Books are absolutely wonderful. The internet is also absolutely wonderful. Electronic books have their potential problems, but they can make the storage of and access to information quite advanced. All the books of all the world in your pocket is soon to be a reality and that is quite a fantastic ability of technology.
But, technology also has the darker side of uses such as changing the content of those books or deleting those books. So, we need real books to ensure authenticity of content. We need electronic computers and books on them for ease of access and affordability and dissemination. But, it is always best to have a hard copy on a shelf in one's home should there be money and space available. But, for those who do not have room or means to buy books and keep them, electronic formats are quite useful.
As of 2010, philosophy is divided into various areas of study, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of various disciplines like the philosophy of science or, more specifically, the philosophy of physics.
Logic, linguistics, and studies of consciousness are some of the fields that are studied in philosophy departments but are often in the domain of other fields. Logic, for instance, often overlaps with mathematics. Linguistics is either a separate area of study by itself or found in anthropology departments. Consciousness is studied in neuroscience as well as philosophy.
Philosophy is important because it forces us to uproot our focus from the specifics of our life and look at ourselves and reality analytically. It may be that philosophy is no more than a game of categorization, but this game has yielded pragmatic classifications and concepts resulting in things like the very computer I am using to write these words.
There is a possibility that existential meanderings about Being can allow us to conceptualize the world in a new way, though much of the same thought can be found in Eastern philosophical treatments that are still largely unexplored in the west.
Philosophy should be an attempt to clarify and shed light on the limits of human knowledge and reason. Philosophies and philosophers that refer to entities like the soul, consciousness, and god as if they are publicly available are fatally flawed and should be in the domain of religion. All philosophy that begins with an assumption about the existence of god, the soul, universal mind, etc. is, in essence, religion and not philosophy.
If we can't study it as a species in a scientific or objective way, then it can not be talked about at all as a real thing. Wittgenstein was central to pointing this out. How far this restriction should actually be thought of as limiting our conversation is questionable. This was the goal of the logical positivists to completely clarify everything.
I think we can reach a pinnacle of clarification but there may be no end or ground to this clarification. Also, the primacy of the proposition and thinking that the world is nothing more than a collection of true statements about it is both naive and incorrect. The world is not necessarily limited to our capacity to investigate it. Rather, it is only our world that is limited to what we can say about it.
Although it may be impossible to completely ground mathematics or logic in a perfect axiomatic way, the usefulness of this clear and precise format is infinite. And, we should not give up on projects to ground or clarify our understanding of reality. Truth in metaphysics is like all truth, in that, it is agreement. If it becomes generally agreed that some theorum trumps or averts Godel's incompleteness theorums, then his theorums have been trumped or averted.
All philosophy should begin with the clear understanding that all statements must be based on an "if" and the only thing we can know without an "if" is that there is something. Perhaps we can be absolutely certain that something exists and it is dynamic because there is constrast.
"Cogito ergo sum". "I think therefore I am". Descartes was certainly right about this although there are many other ways of thinking of this and interpreting reality. I think emotion is primary before reason or self-reference as I discuss elsewhere as in my page "on [this]". But, we do not know that god exists so our knowledge is not necessarily stable but it appears that, at least as long as we have been testing it, it has not changed.
Of course, this does not mean that it will not change, but, until it does, we can have confidence that reality is stable now. If reality is not stable in the future, then we probably won't be around to comment about it because the stability of the universe largely makes us capable of philosophizing about it.
Our complexity and organization depends on the stability of the universe and, in a sense, it is certainly good that it has not changed. We have no reason to believe it will change as we have no reason to believe it won't.
Philosophy is mental exercise when it is about metaphysics and crucial to human life when it is about ethics, value, rights, justice, and judgement.
The question of "What is good?" is the most important question philosophy can ask. Is it good to place the individual above his or her society or is it best to place society above the individual? Is it best to balance the importance of the individual and their society?
I think balance is best but my answer can only arise amidst assumptions that can not be proven. No one can prove judgements of value except in terms of how these judgements come to influence human existence.
We can see, very obviously, that communism fails for some reason when implemented. We can also see, very obviously, that unfettered capitalism is bad for most people and good for a few.
The following is a small, slightly literary, passage from something I wrote in 1999:
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Before all philosophers is a labyrinth of dynamic reality, in which every corridor leads to a
new view of life and existence, and each turn changes the rules of the game.
There are
abyssal depths that bring philosophers into ultimate darkness, depression beyond the cure of
suicide, and absurdity that would crumble the heartiest of souls.
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There are soaring
heights that take philosophers into a utopian world, where everything is perfect, and purpose flows
from a compassionate source.
But these are the extremes of the journey, the polar ends
which must be experienced at once to gain ground. What comes hereafter is the end and the
beginning, the infinite circle of inquiry that may one day spiral in on itself, leading to
some yet unseen answer.
Until that time all we can do is narrow the circle, infinitely
round as it may be, in hope of turning it into the physical impossibility of a black hole,
collapsing in on itself into the singularity of truth and understanding. But, nothing can be sent from the inside of a black hole and truth, like the singularity, may be impossible to convey, fully, to others. However, there is always hope though it does not mean reality will ever yield to our hopes.
