science and philosophy....

so we have science… which is the task of seeing what is
behind events, living beings, mass and matter…
in other words, when there is lighting and thunder, science
doesn’t assume that their is a god behind that thunder and lighting…
science looks for a rational, logical answer behind the thunder and lighting…

and philosophy does the same thing, it looks for what is behind
the events, living beings, mass and matter…
an example of this is in Marx…he looked at human existence
and posited that the drive that pushes human events lies in
the economics of human existence…it doesn’t matter if he is right
or wrong, he saw that the thing that existed behind human existence,
was economics…just as the creation of lighting lies in weather activity
and the interactions between positive and negatively charged ions…

to look behind an event, person, place or thing to see what drives or what
moves those events, people, places or things is the point of, the goal of
science…

as it is the goal/point of philosophy…what lies behind… that is the question
of both science and philosophy… we see this in the branches of philosophy…

Epistemology: the theory of knowledge especially with regards to its
methods, validity, and scope…

Aesthetics: concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty…

political science: is the study of politics, and power from a domestic,
international and comparative perspectives…

Metaphysics: the branch of philosophy that studies the first principles
of being, identity, and change, space and time, causality, necessity
and possibility…

Ethics: discovering the moral principles that govern a person’s behavior
or the conducting of an activity…individually or collectively…

and in each of these branches lies an attempt to go beyond the senses
of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell… to answer that metaphysical
question, what is being? or to answer the ethical question of,
what is the right action? or why is that the right action?
or an understanding of knowledge, how do we know, know
that it is god that has given us our ethics/morality within
the 10 commandments for example…

every single area of philosophy is an attempt to see past or beyond
what is obvious and evident…I hit someone… that is an event…
but let us see past that event and understand the forces or
reasons behind me hitting someone…what drove me to hit someone?
are they rational, logical reasons or are they irrational, illogical reasons?
is my hitting someone “just” or was it “unjust?” and why?

what makes us human? and that is a philosophical question because
it seeks to understand what lies behind who we are…are we human
because we have an ethical understanding of who we are? are we human
because we are rational, logical… as the Greeks thought?
are we human because we can follow god in a way that animal cannot?
are we human because we can discern what is beautiful or what is not
beautiful?

how are we to understand what it means to be human?
by what method or reason should we use to examine
the “human condition?”

we don’t say, how do we understand the “dog condition” because
dogs are pretty straightforward creatures… there isn’t a whole
lot of thought or being behind a dog or its actions… but look at
a human being… yourself for example, what drives you?
it is power, money, fame, titles, searching for knowledge,
seeking wisdom, understanding what is beauty, or understanding
the political context of our lives or perhaps as Marx did, understand
our lives in an economic context?

all existence has rules… all existence must follow the rules of gravity,
evolution, mass, matter, energy, entropy… we too must follow the rules
of existence… but we seem to have other rules that are specific to human beings,
morality for example… does anything else in the universe have rules regarding
morality? but life, our human lives has to have rules of morality, it is hardwired into
us to have rules and part of those rules is ethical rules, how do we treat each other?

but once again, we must ask ourselves, why do we follow these rules of ethics
and not other rules of ethics? and that was the quest of Nietzsche, if he rejected
the moral rules laid down by god and metaphysics, then what rules do we follow?
how do we create ethical, moral rules without invoking god or religion?
can there be ethical rules created solely by the needs and desires of
human beings without any reference to anything outside of our own
human nature? must/can ethical rules exists solely within human
nature? must we go outside of being human to create the rules
of morality/ethics? must we insist on their being a god or some other
supreme being to make sure we have ethical/moral rules to abide by?

to insist that is only by divine nature that we can have moral/ethical rules,
is to insist that we are unable to make sense of what it means to be
human by our own device… we must have others tell us what it means
to be human… we cannot on our own know what it means to be human
because to do so would allow us to create and form our own rules of
morality/ethics…

we cannot create rules of ethics/morality because we simple don’t know
enough about ourselves to create such rules…if we were to actually follow
Socrates and A. know ourselves, and B. the unexamined life isn’t worth living,
then we could know or create the rules of behavior that govern ethics/morality…
because we would be able to know what drove us to act or behave… and
that knowledge would allow us to create the new rules of ethics/morality…

as I have grown older, I have come to believe that the single most important
part of philosophy and of life, is the working out of the ethical/moral aspect
of being human… the most important part of philosophy is the ethical branch
of philosophy…the rest of philosophy flows out of our understanding of
the desires and wants of the human being… to know what it means to
be human is to know what is the ethical/moral understanding of being
human…

so, what is behind the ethical/moral considerations of being human?

Kropotkin

now some might say, it is knowledge that drives the “human condition”
but knowledge of what? knowledge is just a noun, a word like
Kropotkin…but what we need is something to say, knowledge
of “what?” just like if I were to say and only say, Kropotkin…
you would need something more to make any sense of that…
you would need a verb, Kropotkin walked… Kropotkin is walking,
Kropotkin will walk… just as you might say, Knowledge of
science, knowledge of philosophy, to understand the word,
knowledge, knowledge is of something other then itself…

so, how do we know, have knowledge of, that it was god that wrote
the bible? we can guess and we can hope and we can assume, but
in fact, we cannot ever know that it was god that wrote the bible…
we cannot have knowledge of those events and books…

if we use Occam’s razor, then we must conclude that the bible
was written by human beings, for human beings, about human beings…
and had nothing at all to do with a supernatural being/beings, we might
call god…

but that defies the philosophical understanding that there is “always”
something behind us… we have something driving us, causing us
to act and be… the religious say that is god, biologists say it is
biological, chemists say its chemical that drives us, and scientists
say it is natural rules of evolution, gravity, entropy, matter,
energy, mass… that drives us as biological beings…

and as we look behind our existence, as philosophy and philosophers do,
we might see existence as being like an onion, layer after layer after layer
leading us to… nothing… just as in an onion… now what?

what if human existence can only be worked out as part of
our desires and wants and needs that drive us?
and there is nothing past or outside of those needs, wants, desires…
what if, what if human existence was simple us, seeking…
seeking what we desire, want and need? what if, that were
the entire human existence and there was nothing beyond that,
nothing behind human existence… we are just beings with needs,
desires and wants… and there is nothing else in human existence
beyond that?

what if scientists and philosophers were wrong, and that is nothing beyond of
behind human existence except for our needs, desires and wants?

now what?

Kropotkin