Can be divided into 2 camps competing for dominance of the human psyche. In the 1st camp, we have the spirtualizers, theists, mathmeticians, ascetics, idealists (in both the technical and non technical sense of the word), rationalists, right brainers, who’re usually, but not always collectivists, authoritarians, deontologists, altruists, free willers, teleologists.
In the other camp, we have the opposite concepts, of course, what were you expecting? Atomizers, atheists, scientists, hedonists, realists, empiricists, left brainers, individualists, libertarians, consequentialists, egoists, determinists, ateleologists.
Now at this point, your logic is telling you I’m fucking crazy, but your intuition is saying, hang on, there might be something to this, infact, I betch’ve had similar thoughts before, if you’ve allowed yourself to. I think I’m just stating the obvious. I’d like you to put your reason aside during the duration of the OP, let your intuition have free reign, if you would be so kind. You may critique afterwards.
What unites both of these camps, other than being philosophical and at least temporarily committed to persuasion and the free exchange of ideas contra censorship and thought policing, is their commitment to reason as opposed to emotion. Camp 1 places more emphasis on intuition, where as Camp 2 places more emphasis on sensation.
Camp 1 begins with Pythagoras, who believed all could be reduced to numbers. Camp 2 begins with Thales, who believed all could be reduced to water. I’ll just put all the major philosophers into 2 big lists and I think you’ll all be able to see where I’m going with this here.
Camp 1 - Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Cynics and Stoics (more or less), Saint Augustine, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Rousseau, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzshce.
Camp 2 - Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Atomists, Aristotle, Cyrenaics and Epicureans, Saint Aquinas, Bernardino Telesio, Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Condorcet, Marx and most of Anglo-American Philosophy, with the exception of the Transcendentalists and British Idealists.
I left out Kant//
Now, I realize not all these philosophers are going to precisely fit into one of these 2 camps, many straddle the line, this is intended to be a rough approximation, but I think there’s merit to it.
Also, one could include a 3rd camp - sophists, skeptix, most moderns. An innovation came about in 19th century Germany and with Rousseau… they choose to give emotion more priority.
Now, it is my theory that what divides the philosophers, is the dualistic nature of man himself. We simply have different faculties, different personalities that can be ordered and classified. Different cultures, individuals and philosophers have stressed different characteristics and aspects of ourselves. The human being can be split down the middle into opposing halves, right and left. He also has a brain grounded in the senses and logic and a brain grounded in intuition and emotion. This battleground philosophers play on, is simply the institutionalized, systematic projection of the war that’s been raging within our own split, bipolar personalities for centuries. Neither side is entirely right or wrong, every man needs both to be human. Many disorders in man and society can be explained by putting too much importance and only developing a single side of the human psyche. If there is to be harmony in our environment, we must become fully human and not a half. Reason vs emotion, intuition vs sensation, these are the essentials, but perhaps not the only inner dichotomy in man that has brought about these different schools of thought.
On a side note, sad is just happy reversed.
you did it on purpose? good intuition