Review of Philosophy
At the beginning of this year I began to read Kant’s most famous book ‘A Critique of Pure Reason.’ I finished it about a month ago, ten months into the year. This is because I took my time going through the book and took a few months off because I needed a break from Kant. Later in the year I read a book ‘From Socrates to Sartre’ which was an overview of philosophy. It was a lot better than ‘The Western Philosophers’, a book by Bertrand Russell, it was much more up to date and easier to read.
I concluded that philosophy is . . . pointless.
Like the logical positivists, I reject metaphysics. As Kant explained in his ridiculously jargon-heavy book, we simply can’t know the true nature of things through reason alone, and our best reason, that which is based on empirical facts, is still subject to the senses. We can only know what our senses can pick up, or pick up via scientific instrument. Then some guy named Polanyi wrote a book ‘Personal Knowledge’ that long-windedly explained personal sensory experience of scientific observation always came back to whoever is doing the observing. That means a lot of our scientific knowledge is dependent upon the person who figures it out. He argued we only have relativity because of Einstein’s personal creativity. When a student looks at an x-ray image, the black spot on the image is explained to them by the teacher, they do not know implicitly what the image is by looking at it, they need guidance, interpretation, someone else’s experience to know what they are looking at.
Hume was someone I could understand, who used a wrecking ball of argument to demolish everything that thought it was something. He argued, and I’m paraphrasing badly here, that nothing can be proved. A lot of people agreed with him. Kant showed we can’t prove anything in metaphysics either. Who came after them? Lunatics. Philosophy really went off the rails with Hegel, then Marx who read a lot of Hegel and was some kind of Young Hegelian activist. They rejected the earlier philosophers who were coming to the conclusion that nothing can be definitively proven. Then you have these ideas of ‘will to power’ and ‘superman’ and post-modern relativism. I get it, I get why things got this way, because of how philosophy developed.
At least the ancients were concerned with ethics and logic, but they are basically irrelevant from a modern perspective. I’ve read Plato and Aristotle and I was unimpressed. Not because I’m better than they are, only that they no longer matter in the context of modern living.
Sadly, philosophy has not been able to solve any problems other than the ones they say they solved, which are then said to be not solved by later philosophers. Dare I say that philosophy can be boiled down to one idea?
It’s just making things up.
And then “proving” them with some jargon-heavy, made-up words for this one long-winded argument. A lot of the philosophers were guys who spent all their time reading and thinking, demonstrating the dangers of such living. By thinking too much and not having to make a normal living, people descend into a type of logical madness and think they can figure out the world and help it out. Look at billionaires, look at influencers, basically anyone who has too much time on their hands. What do they do? They try to change the world through some sort of philosophy, only that they are dumber and lazier than earlier man who did this, like Descartes, who stayed in bed until noon most of the time.
I used to be impressed with the philosophers, but that’s because I was young and stupid and lacked life experience. I imagined they were important because I was under the spell of the word philosophy itself and an idea that academia was some sort of God’s gift to man. It’s men creatively manipulating logic and language. And the more I read philosophy the less patience I have with it. I now get why some people find it distasteful. Sure, some things in philosophy seem pretty cool, perhaps even important. They’ve done a really good job of showing that people can’t know everything, or anything. Even math can only be known through the senses. Without your senses, could you know anything? Could a baby that is born with no senses (difficult to believe as that is) know anything? Would it intuit that there was such a thing as space? If there was no sense of touch and you couldn’t sense movement, would your brain interpret a concept like space? Hey! I just did philosophy! That’s what philosophy is, coming up with these things, like the senseless baby, and prattling on about it until the reader gives up all their defenses and accepts what you are saying and becomes your student.
But hey, senses work pretty damn well. I trust them with my life. Maybe they are all that can be trusted, except for illusions and mind-tricks, of course. At least by reading and understanding as much as I could of philosophy, I could come to my own conclusion that it’s not for me and I no longer enjoy debating nonsensical things. The tools of logic are nice, but how often do we use them anyway? I’m learning to program, and with programming you need pure logic since the computer cannot intuit anything, but the logic is different than human logic. Humans can also reject perfect logic. We can live and thrive in illogic-land. Some people even attribute their success to how well they are able to trick their brain into thinking they are amazing. And how well does philosophy address the mutability of man’s thinking? How does philosophy deal with relativity, not as a fact of all nature, but as a fact of mankind’s mind? If I feel like I’m a good person, well then, I’m a good person. If I feel like other people are worthless, then I am convinced of that, until I change my mind when someone pulls a knife on me and I realize I’m fragile and mortal.
I recommend reading ‘From Socrates to Sartre’ by T.Z. Lavine. I find it funny I found it at a Dollar Store, some random philosophy book from the 80s. Read it and figure out what philosophy means to you after you’ve had a thorough birds-eye view. For me, it’s lost a place of prestige and dignity I used to hold for it. But my view of philosophy is unimportant to how you view philosophy, in fact, it is meaningless. For all you know I’ve made all of this up, I could be lying through my teeth about what I think and neither of us could argue to prove it either way. What is proof, anyway? What all our senses agree upon? We don’t even have a way to measure pain beyond intuition. I digress…
