MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
I'm wondering how much the philosophical questions that are heated and popular (in any given civilization at any given time) are dependent on the historical circumstances faced by those people.
Philosophy often gets poo-pooed as 'ivory tower'. Many people I've met tend to assume that when we discuss philosophy, we're somehow stepping out of the everyday pragmatic world of mundane concerns, and escaping to a world of abstract fluff, with little bearing on 'the real world'. But what if it were precisely the opposite. What if the philosophical problems that bug people are motivated mostly by real-world things going on around them? If so, it seems that philosophizing is not escapism at all -- it's a product of deep concern over how the world around us is shaping up, and how this will affect us personally.
If so, that raises an interesting prospect for the resolution of philosophical debates that never fail to rile people up, but never seem to reach any resolution. Instead of striving harder for more penetrating inquiry into the question, we need to change something fundamental about how we live our lives and function as a society. And if we do this, the question will magically become somewhat moot, or at least a lot less interesting or seductive.
A good example is the debate among Westerners over Islam, and its (assumedly problematic) relationship to Western Civilization and values. The thing people tend to forget is that before the rise of modern day transportation and the (not accidentally) concurrent global trade in oil, few people even cared enough to even ask this question. Before the colonial era, even fewer cared!
Likewise, the debates over cultural relativism (Can one culture or civilization be objectively deemed superior to any other?) are a distinct product of the nuclear age. The prospect of vast swaths of the earth being capable of being wiping out in an instant suddenly made this philosophical issue incredibly germane.
I'm liable to think that the same property applies to the renewed debates over the existence of God or the supernatural, in the last decade. I tend to think this debate, which never seems to go anywhere, is a product of some kind of very tangible problem or threat perceived by many Westerners. In medical terms, it's symptomatic of a cultural illness, and the symptom (the debate) won't die down until whatever is causing the illness is removed. Personally, I suspect the culprit is a sharp clash between folk Western notions of self and what cutting edge brain scientists are telling us. I see this debate dying down if, for example, a popular thinker and writer emerges with a vision of the self that's at the same time spiritually fulfilling, easy to grasp, compatible with modern brain science, and wholly Western.
It's always struck me that the existence of God is a very minor debate among intellectually minded people in China and Japan. But other philosophical debates, such as practicality vs. giving free rein to human passion, rage far fiercer there than they do in the West. Different peoples at different historical junctures, different philosophical debates.
I wonder if maybe someday we'll look back on the things that really, really mattered to thinking people now, and realize that these concerns had their roots almost entirely with the historical concerns of the day.
Philosophy often gets poo-pooed as 'ivory tower'. Many people I've met tend to assume that when we discuss philosophy, we're somehow stepping out of the everyday pragmatic world of mundane concerns, and escaping to a world of abstract fluff, with little bearing on 'the real world'. But what if it were precisely the opposite. What if the philosophical problems that bug people are motivated mostly by real-world things going on around them? If so, it seems that philosophizing is not escapism at all -- it's a product of deep concern over how the world around us is shaping up, and how this will affect us personally.
If so, that raises an interesting prospect for the resolution of philosophical debates that never fail to rile people up, but never seem to reach any resolution. Instead of striving harder for more penetrating inquiry into the question, we need to change something fundamental about how we live our lives and function as a society. And if we do this, the question will magically become somewhat moot, or at least a lot less interesting or seductive.
A good example is the debate among Westerners over Islam, and its (assumedly problematic) relationship to Western Civilization and values. The thing people tend to forget is that before the rise of modern day transportation and the (not accidentally) concurrent global trade in oil, few people even cared enough to even ask this question. Before the colonial era, even fewer cared!
Likewise, the debates over cultural relativism (Can one culture or civilization be objectively deemed superior to any other?) are a distinct product of the nuclear age. The prospect of vast swaths of the earth being capable of being wiping out in an instant suddenly made this philosophical issue incredibly germane.
I'm liable to think that the same property applies to the renewed debates over the existence of God or the supernatural, in the last decade. I tend to think this debate, which never seems to go anywhere, is a product of some kind of very tangible problem or threat perceived by many Westerners. In medical terms, it's symptomatic of a cultural illness, and the symptom (the debate) won't die down until whatever is causing the illness is removed. Personally, I suspect the culprit is a sharp clash between folk Western notions of self and what cutting edge brain scientists are telling us. I see this debate dying down if, for example, a popular thinker and writer emerges with a vision of the self that's at the same time spiritually fulfilling, easy to grasp, compatible with modern brain science, and wholly Western.
It's always struck me that the existence of God is a very minor debate among intellectually minded people in China and Japan. But other philosophical debates, such as practicality vs. giving free rein to human passion, rage far fiercer there than they do in the West. Different peoples at different historical junctures, different philosophical debates.
I wonder if maybe someday we'll look back on the things that really, really mattered to thinking people now, and realize that these concerns had their roots almost entirely with the historical concerns of the day.
