Its About Philosophy, ......

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Its About Philosophy, ……

Descartes’ legacy to all of us via philosophy can be labeled, I think, as rationalism (discovery of truth through pure reason), dichotomy (mind/body split), and certainty. Even though very few of us know anything about philosophy, almost everything we think results from the philosophy we inherit through social osmosis (unconscious assimilation). Philosophy theory permeates almost all of our mental gymnastics without our conscious recognition.

I speculate that such is true because it fits well for the ego of all humans, especially philosophers, and because it also fits well with the interests of the Christian faith. Descartes’ legacy makes it easy to place our self in a hierarchy of being with humans one step below God and a giant step above animals. If one thinks about it too much we might have difficulty eating the progeny our own ancestors.

If we want to understand our self and our world we will necessarily have to learn some bit of philosophy. That is when we can begin to appreciate certain theories of philosophy. We become interested in philosophy when we begin to ask questions that go to the ‘root’ of the matter.

Someone said that only one person in a thousand ever “strikes at the root”. I do not think a liberal democracy in a hi-tech world can survive if such remains to be true. Hi-tech gives us the ability to easily destroy our self and our world; liberal democracy makes all citizens to be sovereign and thus responsible in some small way for the integrity of our existence.

We are all in the same boat and if only one person in a thousand accepts the responsibility of democracy I think we may be in trouble.

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I personally believe that everyone goes through a stage in their life (often late teens to earliy twenties) were they develope some degree of interest in philosophical-thinking.

Human-Beings, are by their very nature, curious animals. Even Aristotle noticed this. This can be seen in his famous quote, “All men desire to know”.

The key to distinguishing a “real” philosopher from a “fake” one, however, is found by seeing which ones do not ever lose thier interest in philosophy.

Those who really are not truly philosophically will eventually become completely disinterested with it.

Also, I think it is important to bear in mind the fact that many deeply-philosophical people are incredibly reclusive. They may be there, but we are simply not aware of their presence. A philosopher’s life is usually a lonely one (relatively speaking).

So, in truth, there may be more true philosophers out there than we think.

…just my humble thougts, anyaways… :wink:

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Hi Coberst,

A lot of different angles in your post… I will focus on the “striking at the root” in a philosophical sense. I personally see in philosophy – in others words the thought of humankind – two main possible starting points: there is thought which starts by reflecting upon itself, and thought which starts by reflecting on what is not itself.

In this respect, it is not right, in the natural order, to say that we begin by thinking over ourselves. That is not at all what the child does. The child marvels on the contrary on what around him is not him! Aristotle in this way seems to me to have this child spirit which marvels over what surrounds him and asks the why of things, whereas, for some time now, the Moderns have prefered the infantile spirit to the infancy spirit, although they are persuaded of the contrary.

It follows that by starting by a philosophy of the spirit (or more exactly of relation) for the mind can radically only invent relations, negation evidently takes a capital importance, given that the spirit measures all the rest, and that the rest does not measure the spirit.

So the two principal sources of western philosophy are incarnated by Plato and Aristotle, the former having developed a philosophy of relation, all sorts of relations, mostly proceeding from intuition and from a poetical inspiration which he had a gift for, and the second a philosophy of reality.

Have there been other philosophies since that time? No, not to my knowledge. The immense majority of newer philosophies are philosophies of relation: Descartes with his “Cogito Ergo sum”, thus setting explicitly his thought as solely reliable and as the first stone of all his research (going as far as to indicate that he turns his back to Aristotle, and being therefore very conscious of what he does…), Hegel for whom the spirit also primes, the spirit being the spirit which transforms itself and relation substituting itself clearly to substance, Nietzsche for whom man is the artist man, Marx for whom man is the working man and who… idealizes matter! Kant for whom what primes is transcendental subjectivity, Heidegger for whom the being is the being in the mind and who reduces beings to nothing… I don’t see for that matter any other starting point which would not be either reality either relations produced by the mind, for philosophy would have to have a third actor which would be neither reality neither intelligence! I don’t see any other… unless obviously if the profound nature of reality and/or of human nature were to change!

At the end of the day, the difference is there: there are those for whom the being imposes itself to intelligence, and there are the others. In other words, either we accept that it is the being which measures intelligence, and eventually, at the crest, being qua being, or we want to dominate over being, and in that case anything goes, absolutely anything. Furthermore to deny or refuse to give priority to the being over the spirit leads most often to fall into dialectics, without being able to break away from it.

If one does not accept to be dominated by the being, and as one progressively discovers that it is via this route that intelligence attains its true nobility, then anything is possible, and it is this term “possible” which takes precedence over everything, for if intelligence is made essentially for the being, to deny this leads to a suicide of the spirit. Therefore that’s where the choice lays, and moreover and in my opinion it is sensible not to journey down the wrong path.

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I once asked a philosophy professor “What is philosophy about?” He said philosophy is “radically critical self-consciousness”. This was 35 years ago. Only in the last five years have I begun to understand that statement

I took a number of courses in philosophy three decades ago but it was not until I began to study and understand Critical Thinking that I began to understand what “radically critical self-consciousness” meant.

I consider CT to be ‘philosophy light’. CT differs from other subject matter such as mathematics and geography in that it requires, for success, that the student develop a significant change in attitude.

Anyone who has been in military service recognizes the significant attitude adjustment introduced into all recruits in the eight weeks of boot camp. During the first eight weeks of military service each recruit is introduced to the proper military attitude. During the eight weeks of basic training there is certain knowledge and skills that the recruit learns but primarily s/he undergoes a significant attitude adjustment.

I would identify the CT attitude adjustment to be a movement from naïve common sense realism to critical self-consciousness. It is necessary to free many words and concepts from the limited meaning attached by normal usage—such a separation requires that the learner hold in abeyance the normal sort of concept associations.

The individual who has made the attitude adjustment recognizes that reality is multilayered and that one can only penetrate those layers through a critical attitude toward both the self and the world. To be critical does not mean to be negative, as is a common misunderstanding.

If we were to follow the cat and the turtle as they make their way through the forest we would observe two fundamentally different ways that a creature might make its way through life.

The turtle withdraws into its shell when it bumps into something new, and remains such until that something new disappears or remains long enough to become familiar to the turtle. The cat is conscious of almost everything within the range of its senses, and studies all it perceives until its curiosity is satisfied.

Formal education teaches by telling so that the graduate is prepared with a sufficient database to get a job. Such an education efficiently prepares one to make a living, but this efficiency is at the cost of curiosity and imagination. Such an education does not prepare an individual to become critically self-conscious.

If we wish to emulate the cat rather than the turtle we must revitalize our curiosity and imagination after formal education. That revitalized curiosity and imagination, together with self directed study prepares each of us for a fulfilling life that includes the ecstasy of understanding.

I think that radically critical self-consciousness combines the attitude adjustment of CT and combines it with the curiosity of the cat and then takes that combination to a radical level.

A good place to begin CT is: bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Educ/EducHare.htm