Sometimes I wish that I had more time to study philosophy . . . and that there were more people around to talk about it with! Actually, I\u2019ve met a handful of people who know things about the great thinkers and the great ideas. Unfortunately, they\u2019re kind of hard to get thru to. Maybe that\u2019s the way I am too. Maybe there\u2019s just something about philosophy that makes it hard to talk with other philosophers about. Well, such is life.<\/p>\n
Or maybe I just don\u2019t understand it all that well. I\u2019ve been going thru my \u201cGreat Minds of the Western Tradition\u201d CD series again, and I\u2019ve found that I make a bit more sense out of it this round. But still, a lot goes over my head. Some of these thinkers really hit home for me, and some of them don\u2019t. I felt good about Plotnius, Erasmus, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, Hume, Montessquieu, J.S. Mills, Kierkegaard, James, Freud, Dewey and the Frankfurt School. And Nietzsche wasn\u2019t as bizarre as his reputation would have it. But Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein just didn\u2019t cut it with me. And the modern guys (and they are all guys \u2013 not one female made the list of great thinkers here) like Quine, Rawls, Rorty and Nozick left me cold too. Forget about Derida and Levi-Strauss; DOA for me. No one seemed to latch on to anything exciting since the turn of the 20th Century; but then again, it was a difficult Century. And then again, maybe it\u2019s just me and my lazy mind at [non] work.<\/p>\n
One thing that did irk me about so many of the pre-20th Century philosophers was their search for an \u201canchor\u201d, an unmovable reference point for knowing, being and truth. E.g., Descartes\u2019 \u201cI think, therefore I am\u201d. No one ever did much better. Plato speculated that there are \u201cforms\u201d behind it all; Hegel talked about \u201cworld spirit\u201d; Schopenhauer said it is all grounded in \u201cwill\u201d; and Husserl postulated something about a \u201ctranscendental ego\u201d. And of course the ancient Jews and Christians said that it all comes down to God. Some folk said that science and empiricism is the best answer. Well, as it turned out, rational thinking left much to be desired (although irrational thinking leaves even more). <\/p>\n
But one area of science does help answer a lot of philosophical questions, and that is the process of Darwinian evolution. In more than one lecture about a 16th or 17th century thinker, I wanted to shout back that all of this guy\u2019s speculation could have been cut short and a lot of ink and breath could have been saved if they just knew how evolution worked back then. The first \u201cgreat thinker\u201d that seemed to get it was Dewey with his \u201cempirical naturalism\u201d. <\/p>\n
But then again. I enjoy metaphysical speculation too, and I haven\u2019t given up on the idea of God yet. So it may seem a bit contradictory for a person like me to be espousing the theory of evolution as the end-all for human wisdom. Well, perhaps I\u2019m as much of a \u201cpiece of work\u201d as some of the philosophers. Or maybe I\u2019m just ready to concede that there is a natural realm, about which evolutionary processes can tell us much; and there is, at least in our minds, also a metaphysical realm, where everything is up for grabs. And the bridges between the two realms are very shaky. <\/p>\n
But as humans, we are natural bridge builders, just as beavers are natural dam builders. So we go on speculating about how our realm of day-to-day objects, forces and complex side-effects (like American politics) relates to our imagined worlds of \u201cforms\u201d or \u201cGod and heaven\u201d or \u201cgreat laws\u201d. Or perhaps \u201cno other side at all\u201d, as the atheists and modern scientists would have it. Well, no-bridge is still a metaphysical bridge of sorts; perhaps because evolution set our minds up to believe in some kind of metaphysics. It\u2019s just part of our nature. The danger behind all this is that people too often decide that their bridge is better than all others. Then, even worse, they start trying to undermine or blow up the other bridges. That\u2019s known, in its lighter manifestations, as closed-mindedness. When taken too far, it becomes holy war. <\/p>\n
The best philosophy I can think of right now would be the attitude that your \u201cbridge to the other side of reality\u201d is my bridge too, and my bridge is your bridge. All bridges are to be respected (so long as they don\u2019t lead to obviously disrespectful things like ritual killings or such). All religious and metaphysical views are to be considered. No one\u2019s particular vision can contain the whole truth, but perhaps in the sum of all such visions lies a greater truth. That\u2019s the best I can do for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes I wish that I had more time to study philosophy . . . and that there were more people around to talk about it with! Actually, I\u2019ve met a handful of people who know things about the great thinkers and the great ideas. Unfortunately, they\u2019re kind of hard to get thru to. Maybe that\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}