Worthy! Most worthy is the Philosopher
It was oft said that one ought sing the praises of the mystery, "since great is the philosopher in your midst". And yet, to a certain degree, human beings resit philosophy—the gem of existence! Why? They oft make excuses, such as, I have life to worry about. Yet, is this not an appalling shirking of one's duty to roar philosophically, and to heroically inquire into what is?
Comments (68)
For most people a meow is excess work never mind roaring.
But why do you think of it as a duty? Is there some sort of built-in "ought to" function that controls the inquire process or does it just get switched on when it is convenient?
Fear of uncertainty, I would bet.
But why do you think of it as a duty?"
It seems to follow as corollary of philosophy's status as the highest activity vouchsafed to human beings. The rest is "stamp collecting".
"obsessive neurosis"
What does this mean? That philosophizing is an aberration? Like pedophilia for the moderns, or the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period? Or, the bright gleam of the bowers built by the Bower bird? An animal, which, however, it seems, is not quite aware of its own work as work.
But most humans are not philosophers, they resist it. That is why I asked why you see it s a duty for people to be philosophers.
"But most humans are not philosophers, they resist it. That is why I asked why you see it s a duty for people to be philosophers."
I'm with Socrates so far as he made the starkly patent truth vocal in propounding that a life that does not inquire is no human life. Ergo, all humans are philosophers.
Of course, as it seems, one can resist one's highest possibility. That is so, but it is also something perplexing.
I'd say the opposite. Philosophers, in general, seem more fearful of the uncertain than most. That's why they're always cautiously circling around it, with state-of-the-art tools to tame it.
' Repetitions of traumatic events for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery...seen first and most clearly in children's games',although the 'same pattern occurs in the repetitive dreams and symptoms of traumatic neurotics and in many similar little actions of normal persons who...repeat upsetting experiences a number of times before these experiences are mastered.Such traumatic repetitions could themselves appear in active or passive forms. In a passive form, one chooses his or her most familiar experiences consistently as a means to deal with problems of the past, believing that new experiences will be more painful than their present situation or too new and untested to imagine. In the active, participatory form, a person actively engages in behavior that mimics an earlier stressor, either deliberately or unconsciously, so that in particular events that are terrifying in childhood become sources of attraction in adulthood. For instance, a person who was spanked as a child may incorporate this into their adult sexual practices; or a victim of sexual abuse may attempt to seduce another person of authority in his or her life (such as their boss or therapist): an attempt at mastery of their feelings and experience, in the sense that they unconsciously want to go through the same situation but that it not result negatively as it did in the past.
[/quote] (my bolding)
more like the bower bird, and yeah I'd give a shiny nickel to be able to feel what the bower bird feels as it sets about making its bower, without, probably, a clear understanding of the end-product.
I don't know, I don't think it has a "clear understanding" in any sense, not just of the view towards an "end-product".
One speaks as much of "epistemic drive" as of death drive. Are they the same? Is Socratic wonder a military bombardment in the psyche?
For me socratic wonder is very much a military bombardment. Or maybe its that the space of wonder is guarded by artillery, so i want to get there but can't without going through a seemingly endless prepatory reconnaissance phase.
I don't think its that way for everyone, but it seems to characterize a lot of canonical philosophers. I think some of the sturdier, more grounded athenians may have taken a less-complicated pleasure in Socrates' thought. Idk about Socrates, he talked to himself, wandered around scrapping for fights, related to basically everyone ironically and seems to have been an alcoholic (how else would he have outdrank everyone, and remained conscious, in the symposium?)
If we assume there are some things we want in life, and our time and resources are limited, gathering information also has a cost.
If the average cost of the risk we take by making decision based on incomplete information is less than the cost of gathering information, then the cost is not worth it.
My guess would be, following that line of reasoning, that the amount of time one spends on philosophy is not worth it, if we only attribute instrumental value to it.
So then it would only be justified if the activity has some other intrinsic value for you, like some kind of enjoyement or experience of beauty.
Whether it has that intrinsic value or not for someone will ultimately depend on the type of person one is.
And since i don't believe one chooses who one is, the answer to the question will vary from person to person.
So it depends.
"Or maybe its that the space of wonder is guarded by artillery, so i want to get there but can't without going through a seemingly endless prepatory reconnaissance phase."
Brilliant image.
" ironically and seems to have been an alcoholic (how else would he have outdrank everyone, and remained conscious, in the symposium?"
In order not to be accused of being too loose, I must introduce pedantry. Socratic irony seems to mean, chiefly, dissembling of a real superiority, in order not to offend. However, he was slaughtered, and so, one might suppose, there is some flaw in his method of concealment. Think of Lieutenant Colombo! That is another kind of deliberate masquerade for a purpose. Hehe..
It is said Socrates could remain teetotal as readily as he could imbibe fulsomely.
If you're right, then it seems to me philosophy doesn't involve inquiry into "what is" and in fact has little to do with it, if it would have any interest in it at all.
" philosophy doesn't involve inquiry into "what is" "
At first blush I disagree, since it presupposes what the human and what philosophy is. But I'm not sure what you mean by this. What is the reason? Do you mean because "what is" is determined as what always is, as something fixed?
Well, you've said that philosophy is "the highest activity vouchsafed to human beings." You've also said the rest (presumably that which is not philosophy) is "stamp collecting."
I disagree that the rest is "stamp collecting." So, I think that to characterize it as "stamp collecting" is at best erroneous, and indicates neither an understanding of nor appreciation for the rest of "what is" beyond philosophy. And, because characterizing it as "stamp collecting" seems to me express contempt for it, I don't think any useful, fair or insightful inquiry will take place regarding that which is not philosophy (at least as to other human activities) by those who say it is "stamp collecting."
What he actually said was "The unexamined life is not worth living". Well that was his opinion anyway, I have never seen any evidence to back it up though.
You do not have to be a philosopher to examine your life, a lot of people simple ask themselves, "am I happy, content with what I have?" then answer "it ain't f*****g worth the work to get any better". Examination done, go back to the telly and six pack and watch football.
Quoting InternetStranger
Show me how that adds up. From the premises you stated it could just as easily be all humans that don't inquire are not alive. Or not human.
"I disagree that the rest is "stamp collecting." So, I think that to characterize it as "stamp collecting" is at best erroneous, and indicates neither an understanding of nor appreciation for the rest of "what is" beyond philosophy. And, because characterizing it as "stamp collecting" seems to me express contempt for it, I don't think any useful, fair or insightful inquiry will take place regarding that which is not philosophy (at least as to other human activities) by those who say it is "stamp collecting."
I'm following the remark of Rutherford, as you perhaps know. One can take up any cause in the style laid out by Max Weber; so long as one sets down a framework and keeps to it, it is wissenschaft, careful study, but not true knowledge. It is no more the real stuff than is stamp collecting done in a serious and rigorous manner. Which is to say, it is ultimately arbitrary. I appreciate the view you propound, however, its weight, its truth or non-truth, it seems to me, is a matter for philosophic research. Only the essential truth of the human being has the piercing power to ask this question and move into this question as though to measure it. Ergo, it is the human being and it is the most serious pursuit of the human being.
I'm not with your view because one would have to ask it, rather than take it up as a conviction that does justice to mankind as what sounds right to a man of sound heart and mind, but... prior to investigation.
"In the end all that philosophy really tells us is what we already knew"
Not sure how the whole of human life could be described as showing what one already knows. Since philosophy and the human being are the same, this does not persuade me.
"What he actually said was "The unexamined life is not worth living". Well that was his opinion anyway, I have never seen any evidence to back it up though."
That's the brilliant classicist Jowett's translation. Often classicists are quite impossible when it comes to philosophic meaning. What Socrates said is closer to what I put down. It was a definition as a formulation of his soul's opinion. He held this, we hold this, just as we hold that Crete is an Island. As, I believe, even given the intervening millennia, it still is.
"You do not have to be a philosopher to examine your life"
Exacto! Now you are closer (you already were) to seeing it, the path of Socrates', and what he knew. To be human is to philosophize.
"From the premises you stated it could just as easily be all humans that don't inquire are not alive. Or not human."
Humans can sink bellow the level of human beings, become beasts. Only true philosophic exercise tempers the barbarous animal, makes it human. Such is true education. Think of the harrow of beastliness under which Nebuchadnezzar was stricken. Hitler and his fellows, for instance, were fittingly called wild beasts. They sank bellow the level of the human being.
I don't know Rutherford. I had to read Weber in one connection or another in one class or another in one school or another, long ago, and haven't been inclined to read him since then. I was brought up Catholic, you see (not one now, though). Never understood those heretic Protestants. Damn their ethic, anyway.
In the Western tradition, philosophy has been distinguished from the mundane, day-to-day lives of everyone (philosophers included) since Plato, probably before. It's supposed to be the study of a kind of a postulated "higher reality" which differs from the base, mutable "lower reality" in which we live. I think that's a misguided view and so react negatively when philosophy is portrayed as the study of something superior in some profound sense to life as lived.
Personally, I think philosophy is for those who are not focused enough for STEM study and research. However, don't worry, as you can keep piggybacking off the findings and pretend it was your own brilliance.
" I think that's a misguided view and so react negatively when philosophy is portrayed as the study of something superior in some profound sense to life as lived."
Rutherford isolated the nucleus of the atom. He wasn't, however, concerned with its possible applications. He died believing nothing would come of that discovery, and that the release of the energy from the nucleus would not mean much. He gloried in the knowledge for its own sake, i.e., real knowledge. Not "stamp collecting".
Weber in many respects controls the universities today. The notion of the "ideal type" is very powerful. The notion of a "fact value" distinction (which, make no mistake, became powerful through Weber, though it was developed by Simmel and stems from Nietzsche, Hume is only accidentally and retrospectively credited with this because of Kant/Nietzsche) controls the whole academic product and the methodology of each field (just as much and more in the those social sciences were it is explicitly rejected, because it still founds those disciplines in their methodology:, e.g., sociology, ethnology, anthropology and the rest of the Kulturwissenschaften). The systematic expulsion of subjectivity, political science, not political philosophy.
Ergo, the point is, philosophy is no other world. Think of living in a tribal life of scarcity and without education. Is it not closer to barbarity? According to the Roman historian Florus, Numa tamed the barbarous Romans, and prepared them for human life. This was through his piety, what piety is, is the subject of the Euthyphro. It is quite instructive to see how the way of experience exercised through speech, which is not something added on to the body, but since understanding is bodily, it is the body, comes to live in the race, human beings. Ergo, the raising up is what you are now because of what has been philosophized.
"Personally, I think philosophy is for those who are not focused enough for STEM study and research.[/quote]"
However, since philosophy is the human being itself, this is a starkly senseless claim. E.g., since you yourself are a philosophic being producing a drearily naive philosophy (or, merely retailing what has been placed in your soul by your experience, i.e., of your environment, which is culture). One can show reaction norms predict you(s) will oft be produced by the current conditions. That is patently obvious!
Of course, surely it is a simple enough word, Russel says: philosophy is the unknown, science is what is known. All that is science, was once philosophy.
I would modify that to say, there is no certainty with respect to the knowing of the known. And so the pervading storm of philosophy is one's most serious concern.
Superficial nonsense. What actual skills do you have that could be used to advance STEM research?
As a philosophic being, who has been well able to defend yourself, by generating a cheep philosophy. Though, I feel you misuse your essential powers, that is your affair, naturally.
Or should that be: Unworthy! Most unworthy is the Posturer!
You didn't listen to anything said.
Sure I did, you said a whole lot of nothing.
You're a fine rhetorician. Since you want to seem to win, rather than work towards the general cause of reason.
You are still avoiding my question.
You have a cheep debating tactic. If I may presume, congratulations. However, did you ever trouble to see what the title PhD means?
Considering that all you mention is philosophy, the question is doubly senseless. Science is the name for the part of philosophy that came to power about the year 1900. Although, then, still, philosophy was oft used as the name for all the sciences inclusive. How can there be one idea called science? Don't you perceive a distinction between biology and physics, for example? Why the huge compound tag: Science? How did that come to get established? By human beings, or did it fall from your teacher's mouths like heavenly music, or perhaps over your cradle, whispered by the gods?
Why do you want to appeal to public predilection? If we have a mathematician or a physicist here, will you suddenly beg pardon? What motivates this dubitative question, what progress does it point towards in the dialogic exchange? What worthy of a serious person does it promise; are you a friend of reason or popular adulation?
:rofl:
"It seems some people like to sport "philosophy" in the same fashion the emperor strutted around in his new clothes."
I agree. However, not always. And it is the chief human trait, to experience anxious consternation and to question the world actively with all their powers.
If STEM is philosophy then why do you not pursue it?
When you get right down to it, there is no way any legitimate philosopher can bypass math and/or science. Personally, I am not a philosopher, my area is mathematical science, but I respect a philosopher who is disciplined in their studies, while I consider others lazy wannabes.
I think yours views are misguided as well, but I did not react negatively to it. I did not even say that philosophy was a study of something superior.
Quoting InternetStranger
So what? How big of a percentage of humans stand along side him? Do you think that all humans should be scientists as well?
Quoting InternetStranger
Again, so what? what does this have to do with your statement that all humans are philosophers and therefore should practice philosophy?
Quoting InternetStranger
Who said it was?
Quoting InternetStranger
Downtown in most big cities you can find street people that are close to being barbarians, is that because of lack of philosophizing?
Quoting InternetStranger
You are what you are now because of history, not all of history was philosophy. Come to think of it there were actually very few philosophers through out history.
Man is not a born philosopher even though he is a born thinker, they are two different things. Science is what has created the screwed up world we live in, why don't we have more scientist to try and straighten it out? Simple, because not everyone is capable of being one. The same goes for philosophy, not everyone is cut out to be one.
I personally would hate to live in a world where everyone practiced philosophy, we would probably still be the same as in the 12th century.
Pot kettle, kettle pot? I don't remember but I am sure you get the idea.
Right.
As I said earlier, most people don't want to work that hard. Why should they question things that will bring them no benefit?
Lots of people do some philosophic text reading and then quote pieces of them as if they are gospel, and call themselves philosophers. Most of the time without fully understanding the meaning of what they read. A call to some authority of something is all ways right they think.
It's less than clear to me that a person who seeks or acquires "knowledge for its own sake" is in any sense admirable, let alone more admirable than someone who does so for a purpose or with a regard towards what the consequences or use of that knowledge may be. Depending on the circumstances, I might think the former short-sighted, or unduly self-involved, or uncaring, or a practitioner of a kind of intellectual onanism if the person "glories" in such self-gratification.
"Science" is the name for the currently most popular or publicly powerful form of philosophy. Of the West as such. Stemming from Pythagorean and Platonic teachings of the cosmic power of maths. Remember, the word academic means Plato's Academy, which is the bowels of all universities on the earth, and all their research programs.
"It's less than clear to me that a person who seeks or acquires "knowledge for its own sake" is in any sense admirable, let alone more admirable than someone who does so for a purpose or with a regard towards what the consequences or use of that knowledge may be."
Questioning is human. However, sometimes this impulse is broken. For instance, one feels as though it is more than clear that the purposes of the modern technocratic worker, devoted to benefiting human beings, are sensible in many cases. But, so did Mao with his rational Four Pests Program. So, would one not be justified in celebrating the illumination implied by the discovery or invention of a true and right purpose? For Rutherford genuine investigation of the cosmos was augmented by Political Philosophy, but that no longer exists in any serious sense. Ergo, the lack of any genuine education and the gigantic cauldron of public confusion.
Wrong, it does not.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=academic+
And his was not the first Acad?micus either. Just because its common modern used goes back to him does not mean that he came up with the idea of academies.
Quoting InternetStranger
Which is sort of like calling universities shit.
Quoting InternetStranger
If you count inquisitive as questioning, I have a very philosophical 3 month old pup. She has toured the house, poked at, bitten at, licked, and rubbed against every single thing she can reach to find the best place to take a nap. That was some serious dog style questioning.
It's not clear who is supposed to answer that question, since the most powerful form of philosophy has become the idea of Science, & Science doesn't think, reason or question (as did the older philosophy). According to the Greek idea, philosophy as such, which was extinguished and became the planetary Science, one must strenuously seek the answer to the question: What is choice worthy for its own sake?, i.e., what is good for the human being. No one can say Science is good, except as a story or value judgment. Science can make no test of that (the ideology about utilitarian ethics is not scientific except accidentally in its search for means.) One is drawn into the powerful vortex of a blind, but commonplace and unconscious obedience to the idea of Science. One appeals to it demagogically, to its popularity as world interpretation. Every attempt to question this fateful order is assigned, in advance, the status of a 'let's pretend', which never questions the utter pretending of the idea that science is choice worthy for its own sake. What the human being is, is not asked, it is simply that which takes commands from the idea of Science like an extraordinary inchoate and patternless process which is no longer a nature in contradistinction to the human being. Everything becomes a radical dispensation of the fate of something wholly unintelligible; without potential.
Science is good. Looks like someone can say it. Should I test that again?
". No one can say Science is good, except as a story or value judgment."
You aren't able to raise yourself to the minimum requirements of intelligent discussion. You're mindless manner of debating is cheep and boring.
"Wrong, it does not."
It does.
" classical Latin Acad?m?a gymnasium near Athens where Plato and his successors taught, school of philosophy founded by Plato, dialectical training of this school, title of a work by Cicero, in post-classical Latin also university (15th cent.; from 16th cent. in British sources) < ancient Greek ????????..."
OED
It was the model for the West. Greater familiarity with the great thinkers of the west is the best way to prove this to yourself.
Anyway, no one is paying me to argue remedial points. Boring.
Try doing some reading yourself. Academy comes from the name of the place where Plato taught. I have not seen many classes being given in public gardens.
"the classical Academy," properly the name of the public garden where Plato taught his school, "
https://www.etymonline.com/word/academy?ref=etymonline_crossreference
The fact that the word was later adopted to mean schools does is not the equivalent of "meaning" Plato's academy. And as the link I gave pointed out, it was mostly used for theoretical studies not practical research.
Lyceum has a more profound affect on people today, that was where Aristotle taught.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/lyceum?ref=etymonline_crossreference
Simply look how much longer Plato's academy existed, than the Lyceum. It was not so much after it closed that the modern universities came in. It's more like the situation of the elite universities today. Of course there exist thousands of schools, but Harvard and Columbia, Yale and Princeton, or in the sciences Cal Tech and MIT, are the basic models for all learning on the earth. Words like academic reflect that, but reading etymologies of words that so clearly reflect the origin, academician, academic, and so on, is not sufficient to adequately establish that, one ought to consider how Plato was regarded by the most serious and effective persons. Aristotle had to be brought back in, long after the modern universities were established on the model of the academic teachings. I'm not a scholar on the subject, but it is generally well established, and, I believe, corresponds to the truth at the simplest level of the things already said.
Recall the famous word concerning Plato, the west is a series of footnotes to the model he set out. One need not think of the physical setting of a garden, but of the perfect model of education.
:P
No, I don't recall ever hearing that. Do you have a link to the source?
It's Alfred North Whitehead, of course, it's clear Aristotle was the student of Plato. Slightly less obvious is that Plato was the great synthesizer of the early Greeks, the first to bring it all together, and, more importantly perhaps, the first philosopher that we have more or less in his total output. The leap is to ask, what does it mean to set up a university? If it means, one needs a model for the curriculum, what to study, how to divide the sciences under study, and so forth, it comes clear why philosophy was known historically as the Queen of the Sciences, which meant, the collective title for all the sciences inclusive. Of course, in former times, grammar was as much a science as music, rhetoric, astronomy, or maths. The simple definition of science is something that is teachable that requires speech, rather than a handicraft. For this reason Plato and his epigones could set the older model, prior to the rise of the modern idea of science.
From the above link, but also available through other sources.
"Sextus Empiricus enumerates five divisions of the followers of Plato. He makes Plato founder of the first Academy, Aresilaus of the second, Carneades of the third, Philo and Charmides of the fourth, Antiochus of the fifth. Cicero recognizes only two Academies, the Old and the New, and makes the latter commence as above with Arcesilaus. In enumerating those of the old Academy, he begins, not with Plato, but Democritus, and gives them in the following order: Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Socrates, Plato, Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, Crates, and Crantor. In the New, or Younger, he mentions Arcesilaus, Lacydes, Evander, Hegesinus, Carneades, Clitomachus, and Philo (Acad. Quaest. iv. 5). If we follow the distinction laid down by Diogenes, and alluded to above, the Old Academy will consist of those followers of Plato who taught the doctrine of their master without mixture or corruption; the Middle will embrace those who, by certain innovations in the manner of philosophizing, in some measure receded from the Platonic system without entirely deserting it; while the New will begin with those who relinquished the more questionable tenets of Arcesilaus, and restored, in come measure, the declining reputation of the Platonic school."
This might interest you as well, although I doubt that what it says really shows that his model of education is used much today.
http://infed.org/mobi/plato-on-education/
"This might interest you as well, although I doubt that what it says really shows that his model of education is used much today."
Of course I wasn't asserting that it is, or ever was, as it were, simply the model. Because there is change and modification. Evolution if you like. You know, at one point millions of years ago our ancestors selected for sexual differentiation, such still exists in much modified form. The history must still be there, as something genuine still unfolding. As ground. On the other hand, one can show many of the first beginning's features are still quite powerful, almost in the same form, such as the method of making taxonomies. Many things are so basic that we don't consider they had once to be invented, such as grammar, for instance. This is, so I am told, quite starkly true also of the wheel, which didn't exist in South America at the time of the Conquest.
I wondered why I had not heard it before, because that is not what was said. Again you have quoted incorrectly.
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. ... "
Quoting InternetStranger
It is also pretty well known that a lot of the work that has been attributed to Plato was not actually written by him but was attributed to him because the author was unknown and the style of writing was similar to his.
"Again you have quoted incorrectly."
Interpreted, if you will. According to the present needs. That's why I said "The leap is to ask, what does it mean to set up a university?". In order to show the connection between the (modified) remark, and the issue under discussion.
"It is also pretty well known that a lot of the work that has been attributed to Plato was not actually written by him but was attributed to him because the author was unknown and the style of writing was similar to his."
For the purposes of the present point I think it's sufficient to use Plato as the title of a tradition. Embodied in the Academy which is said to have fallen in the sixth century common era. After all, the epigones, the copiers, are part of that tradition. They utilize his model, as Plato followed the ways of Socrates, the first Greek thinkers, and whatever he heard of the Persians, Egyptians and others.
You scratch at the surface for superficial comprehension and try to peddle that as wisdom. Real comprehension takes real work and I just don't see the effort in you. So I am happy to facilitate snarky remarks, but I don't feel you are worth serious thought.
Ouch!