as getting ready to go to work didn’t take as long as I thought,
I shall post this quickly…
the search for in philosophy is the search for certainty
what is clear and certain has been the search for philosophy
since the Greeks… and that is and has been why philosophy has
failed…if we demand, with a scientific certainty to what facts or
evidence is “certain” we are left with nothing, nothing at all…
there is nothing absolutely nothing in the universe we can hold as
to being a “certainty”…there is no fact or evidence that we can
hold to being absolutely “certain”
for example, all men die… well, we in fact can’t know that…
we don’t have enough evidence to hold to that proposition…
we can’t know if every person born on planet earth, has in fact died…
we don’t have enough evidence…and we certainly cannot guess into
the future where in fact, it might be possible for all human beings will
live forever… again, not enough facts to know…so that “fact”
that all human beings die… isn’t a “fact” but a guess, a hope…
there is no fact or evidence that isn’t held in place by any sort of
validity…there is a god… again, no evidence of any sort…
let us try this… all life dies…
we cannot know that answer because we don’t know about “all” life…
human beings and animal life and plant life might be the only life
in the universe that does die… all other life lives forever…
we just don’t know…
we have nothing to be certain about in any aspect of our life…
as Hume pointed out, much of what we take as certainty,
is really just hope or assumption or simply bias or
even just force of habit…we assume the sun will rise tomorrow
because we are in the habit of assuming that the sun rises every day…
there is not certainty in any aspect of our life and this drives
us to seek out certainty…a certainty that doesn’t exist in any,
way, shape or form…
and I would suggest that this drives the right wing to its drive
to find a certainty in which to believe in… be it a god, religion,
a messiah like Jesus or IQ45…or even if you are opposed to something,
that is still certainty of a sort… that ism is wrong… that is a certainty…
I might hold that every single aspect of human existence might be
a drive or a search for some sort of certainty…
any belief that might be held is a search for something to have
be certainty in our existence…
let us take some facts…the earth is 93 Million miles from the Sun…
that is taken to be a fact, a certainty, but the truth is the number
of 93 million miles is really an average of the distance from the sun
to the earth…for sometimes the earth is 92 million miles from the sun
and sometimes it is 94 million miles or more in fact… but to create
some sort of certainty, we assume the actual distance is 93 million miles…
the earth is round… no, in fact the earth is closer to egg shape then
a round circle… but it sounds better and more certain to say, the earth
is round…
there is no fact or evidence that exist that doesn’t create some sort of certainty
we use facts and evidence and beliefs and hopes to create a sense of certainty in
our lives… and we use this when we say, there is a god
and we use this when we say, “America is the greatest country
on earth” and yet by most measures of evidence, which is really just
made up facts and evidence, “America isn’t the greatest country on earth”
but that does create some sort of certainty in people’s lives…
and that is the important thing… the creation of certainty,
not the facts or evidence used to create the certainty…
philosophy is the “logical” search for some sort of certainty in
our lives… so, there is no certainty in life that we can count on,
what does that mean for us as human beings?
One might hold that the real meaning of philosophy is to prepare us for
a world/universe where there is no certainty…how do we exists or
go on when there is nothing we can be certain of?
that becomes the great reason for the existence of philosophy…
to allow us to exists and thrive even though there is absolutely no
certainty in existence or our lives…
the path of philosophy going forward is to enable us to live our lives
without any certainty to hang on to…
philosophy is to create the grounds upon we can exist and survive our lives…
so philosophy is not created in wonder or in doubt or in habit…
but as a means to learn of how to live in a world without
certainty…
Kropotkin