reading up on the scientific method. Can we lay the scientific method
on top of philosophy and get “results”? Is the scientist the role model
for philosophy or as Socrates and Plato believed, the doctor is the role model for
philosophy? Kant tried to make philosophy “scientific” with his method but
by all accounts he failed. Can you take the scientific method and use it on
philosophy? Create a hypothesis and then find an experiment to prove or disprove
said hypothesis? Is it that easy? I would doubt it because generations of philosophers
have come down the pike and I haven’t hear of many, if any at all, using such methods.
Reading about Charles sanders pierce and I am beginning to see. He wrote that people
philosophize not to find the truth per se, but to remove doubt. To remove doubt?
that is not science, but what if we philosophize in a positive manner and use
philosophy to find the truth but who do we follow, the scientist or the doctor.
Nietzsche would use the doctor but then N. always did follow the Greeks.
time to get ready for work and so much to think about.
Kropotkin
What if the failure of philosophy, that is so self-evident, is because of the
failure of philosophy to follow the right role model? Perhaps the
historian is the right role model? Or perhaps a new model is needed?
the strength of philosophy is in its only advantage over science, which
is philosophy ask, why? Why does the universe exist? The scientist can only
say, how the universe exists, but not why. The priest can say why, but there is no
method there, only faith and faith has proven itself to be a failure time and time again.
I had faith that… only to be disappointed yet again. I have seen believers, true believers
turn against their faith because the facts on the ground couldn’t be solved by faith or the
facts on the grounds went to a point where faith could no longer sustain it.
My gut instinct is the role model we want for philosophy is the doctor, but
only by researching the concept can we actually decide which role model is right for
philosophy and perhaps different aspects of philosophy need a different role model. The
area of logic is where the scientist is strongest, so there we follow the scientist. the area
of ethics might require the doctor. So we shift gears and follow the role model that
seems to fit the area being looked at.
Kropotkin
I am breaking my usual habit and writing after work around 9:00 at night,
so if I sound different that is why.
I pose a question in my last post in which should the philosopher follow the
scientist or the historian or the doctor, when the philosopher does philosophy.
Ok, let us try this, following in the path of the historian, the question is;
what was the cause of the fall of the Roman empire?
Now I have studied this and the reasons are many,
among the most common reasons given is taxes (the unfair tax burden on the poor to
cover the wealthy and churches who paid no taxes, sound familiar?)
The economic burden of paying for a standing army.
the rise of Christanity which sap the vitality of the empire. (Edward Gibbon went with this one)
The problem of succession for the Caesars.
the barbarians who invaded Gaul and spain and finally Italy.
The diseases like the plague and other diseases that finally sap the empire.
You can go on for a while but you get the idea.
Now you can do the research and trust me, people have
researched the shit out of this one. But which truth is THE TRUTH about how
the empire fell. Clearly, many reasons contributed to the fall of Rome. so how do you
assigned blame as it were, to maybe one or two reasons? You can write whole books,
in fact, Gibbon’s decline and fall takes up 6 big volumes. You have Bury’s couple of volumes
on the same subject and those are books written centuries ago. So a historian must
take into account multitude of reasons to even come close to adequately covering the topic.
So the philosopher takes note of this. His question “what is the meaning of life?”
must and/or follow the historian. So you need to list all the possible reasons for the meaning of
life. You can almost divide it up into religious and non-religious meanings of life.
To praise god, to devote time to god, to do religious work in search of god, this list can
go on almost forever.
The non religious can go to finding happiness, to finding inner peace, to making a shitload
of money, traveling, to hell almost anything. the list is practically the list of everything
humans do. so you have to somehow narrow the list down or perhaps ask a question that is
not so vague. and so it works itself down. Asking question after question after question trying
to find a way to ask what is the meaning of life without making it so vague that it becomes
almost useless.
ummm, more thinking needed.
Kropotkin
Ok, last night I tried to philosophize like a historian with this sentence,
“What is the meaning of life”, the problem turned on the word meaning
because anything can have any type of meaning. So we change the sentence,
“What is the purpose of life” This brings better clarity I believe.
So purpose is real point and as I spoke of earlier, the purpose of human beings
is to procreate and continue the species. The so called sex drive is really not about
sex at all, but about procreating and continuing the species, so says the biologist.
but the chemistry guy is going to say, that the sex drive is really not biology but
chemistry. It is hormones that power the “sex” drive and hormones are really about
chemistry. Now the physicist might say, not so fast, it is really is about …
So the scientists will say that it is their specialty which drive the purpose, be it
biology or chemistry or physics. but how do we escape the fact that the sciences
are in a better position to show us purpose. Science is more about the how, not the why.
Why something exist is not really up science alley. the how, yes, and where and who and
the what, yes, science does tell us these things, but why? No, science is rather bad at the why.
Science can tell that the BB occurred 13.8 billion years ago, but why, and there science fails us.
the historian can tell us the why, why did Rome fall or why did King John sign the Magna Carta.
Those why’s is something a historian can tell us but science cannot say a word about. Science
is about finding the truth of a physical situation, such as what is the truth about the revolution
of the truth. first science believed that the sun revolved around the earth. then science “discovered”
that the earth revolved around the sun and then we learned the earth revolved around the sun
at around 93 million miles in roughly a circle, roughly. but at no point does a why enter here.
Why does the earth rotate around the sun at about 93 million miles?
So science can answers some of our questions but not all. For example, what is a human being?
So a biologist is going to say, a human is a biological creature that came from other life and
life is billions of years old, or whatever shit a biologist is gonna say. Now the chemist is going
to say, a human being is a series of chemical reactions. The physicist is going to say, a human being
is… and a historian is going to say…and they will all be right about what a human being is,
but none of the scientist is able to say why a human being?
They can in great detail, go into what a human being is made of and what the biological processes
going on and what are the chemical processes going on, but not why?
so for each branch of science and a historian, they have their own definition of what a human being
is and for each, and they are right.
but none of them will be able to embrace the whole of what a human being is and finding that
whole is what a philosopher does. What is the whole of being human?
Next we talk about the doctor and the psychiatrist and their take on the whole business of
being human.
Kropotkin
Ok, now we try to philosophize like a doctor or a psychiatrist.
Each as their own vision of what being human is like. From a psychiatrist standpoint,
a human is all about mind and a doctor is about the body.
As mentioned, the Greeks felt that there was a connection between
philosophy and medicine. Both Socrates and Plato, in fact the entire
philosophical community of ancient Greece, felt that “doing” philosophy
was like a doctor giving a diagnoses to society. Nietzsche carried on this
idea, because that is what N. did, follow the Greeks. So let us return to the question,
of “Why did Rome fall” from a doctor perspective. The doctor cannot make a
diagnoses without some understanding of what is the base condition of the subject.
for example, we cannot tell if someone is sick if we don’t know what their normal
day to day, base condition is. So for a doctor to tell if I am sick, she has to know
how I am day to day and my doctor has seen me for many years, so she
has blood work of me, and test on virtually every part of my body. So I complain
of a fever. She knows my basic operating condition and by testing, she can tell
if something is off, like my blood count or something is different than normal.
The doctor can also tell by knowledge that a flu is going around and that might
affect her diagnoses because of this knowledge. so for Socrates doctor to make
a diagnoses of society, they must know the normal state of society.
What would create an “illness” in society? What would an ill society look like?
A look at Roman history revels that quite often Rome was in some form or
another, civil war. If not Caesar making war on Mark Anthony, it was some
general on the frontier who declared themselves Caesar and then the current
Caesar would battle the wannabe Caesar until one would win and then quite
often on another front another wannabe would declare themselves Caesar and
then the cycle would repeat. This was the history of Rome from around 180 AD to
roughly the end of Rome around 476 AD. So from a illness perspective, is this perpetual
civil war, a sign of illness or a sign of business as usual? I would think that civil war was
a sign of illness. The society was ill and the civil war was a flu or a cold needing to
be fought over. You have to figure out what is the base of society health and then you
can figure out if the society is ill. Nietzsche felt the two healthiest times of humans
was the Greek period and the Renaissance. So we use those two examples as health for
human being and he felt that the sickness in society was during the Dark ages.
So we now have some idea of what we are looking for, are we healthy or are we in this
current time, ill? What would a healthy society look like and what do we look like?
Kropotkin
Ok, to continue on, what would be the base for say, the American society?
Would the time period be during the civil war? No, that would be an illness,
think of a cold or flu. The body fighting itself would be an illness and so would
a nation fighting itself. In reviewing the last say, 100 years, I would say, the healthiest
period was the 1920’s. the next healthiest period would be the years between 1955 and
1965. Next would be the 1990’s. What do these years have in common? I would say, they
were years of hope and years of optimism. They were years of a vitalism. To my mind,
we have really had problems since the closing of the frontier. That moment which was decided
to be 1895, has had a major effect on the American psyche. As a country, the most decisive
moments were the civil war and the closing of the frontier. We have been lost without an agenda
since the closing of the frontier. So to broaden it out, each country has a base period where
it felt good. Just like when you feel good and feel healthy, everything flows and you don’t
have doubts or worries. You just do and the same goes for a country. It just flows and move
with a certainty. the mind and body are one. The agenda and the ideology are one.
A look at this time and place, right now, revels that we are at war with each other.
we are not one. we have no agenda and have lost our ideology. We are alienated from
each other. We have symptoms of an illness and what is the diagnoses? We are apart because
we have no common goal or common fight, so we unite the people with a common goal, common
fight by creating a common goal. That is best done with going into space. We use space as a
common denominator to unite people into a common goal. Not everyone will agree, but enough
will agree that will give us a common and valuable goal that we can achieve on. This common goal
is enough to create a situation where we feel good and healthy and we don’t have doubts or worries.
the mind and body are one and the agenda and ideology are one.
Kropotkin
Wrong…the healthiest this nation was when it was founded…the 13 colonies…
You mourn the closing of the frontier…the frontier…wasn’t those the days where americans slaughtered natives by the droves?
A couple of points before I move on, A, I said in the last 100 years,
B. I believe the loss of the frontier meant that we lost our goal, our mission
and that loss has (in part) created the issues we have today and I stand by
that statement. We don’t have a goal, we don’t have a mission statement as it
were for us, so we don’t have any direction in our society and having a frontier created
that direction, that purpose, that goal for our society. That is what we have lost, our sense
of what is next for us. What is next? More of the same? We don’t have focus because we
don’t have a goal for us to achieve, the frontier created that for our nation for 300 years and
space will create that for us going forward.
We looked at a doctor last time in terms of a philosophy, now we turn to the mind doctors,
the psychiatrists, (now in terms of full disclosure, my sister is a psychiatrist) the problem I have
with them is this idea of normal. What is normal in terms of how the mind works? We have
heard stories of people who were loved in a community and married and they went off either
as a serial killer or with a gun on a rampage. Who is really normal and what does this normal look
like? The truth is we have no idea of what is really normal in the psychological sense, we have
guesses and half truths but nothing I would want to hold anybody too.
I think this lack of knowledge makes psychiatrists a bad choice to follow in terms of
a philosophy, although Nietzsche called himself a psychologist and had insights into
the mind and soul. I suspect a philosopher needs to be part psychologist to be able
to make sense of society, to philosophize. To find motivation in people is part
psychologist and to just understand the world is not enough, we must create a new
path and a new motivation to follow that new path. to philosophize, we must
acknowledge the past, understand the present and lead a path into the future.
We operate in time and space. Looking forward, backwards and sideways, and
we put these into perspective along with working with the space around us.
We, ourselves are the singularity and everything flows from us.
Kropotkin
So robbing land and murdering people…that was gave you purpose, your mission, the direction society needs?
Look, I know you are young and confused but try to read without adding things.
At no point have I said word one about the genocide of the American Indians nor
have I said anything about the theft of their land and there is a good reason for that.
It is not relevant to what I am saying. I am saying that the frontier creates a purpose,
a goal to be achieved. That is all I am saying. Anything else, you are adding.
Kropotkin
Im just stating the facts…
You didnt talk about frontierism as an abstraction, the star trek…exploration of man…
you talked specifically about the american frontier, and how it benefited the american nation…
it’s the old who tend to be the most confused…
following my initial premise of the doctor and how philosophers should emulate
doctors in the practice of philosophy. What skills set should the philosophers have
in following the doctors? I would say the philosopher needs to be very well read in
history. You base your diagnoses on historical principles. You also base it on
philosophy which is really nothing more than learning how to think. How to think
about certain matters and how to make judgments about certain matters.
a doctor/philosopher needs more than a working knowledge of science for
the doctor is a scientist. you use the scientific method to sort out symptoms and
create a diagnose of the illness and philosophers can do the same. What are the
symptoms of the society and what illness does it have? So let us try this little game.
Let us look at society today and see if we can spot its symptoms based on our knowledge
of base societies.
Today, right now it is Sept 16, 2015 at 9:51 in the morning.
I attempt to compare our time and place with another.
I am old, I was born in 1959 and so I have seen a whole lot of years gone by.
Some decades were decades of doubts, the 1970’s was a decade of doubt grounded
by both the Vietnam war and Watergate. Today, you cannot guess at the impact that
Watergate had on the American psyche, but it was probably the event of the 70’s. nothing that
happened in the 70’s can be explained without resort to Watergate. As a doctor/philosopher,
I see we have doubt in this time and place. Our event was 9/11. We too have doubt,
indecision, a malaise that was also present in the 70’s. We are just as rudderless and confused as
we were during that decade. It isn’t just about Jimmy Carter (a vastly underrated president)
but about the soul sickness that we had then and we have now. today just as then, we have a
vast number of people who are only interested in saying no. They offer no alternatives, no choices,
no possibilities. The answer is no. today we call them republicans and the GOP party. Then
it was a broader coalition that said no, today it is conservatives. The time of the 70’s was
a time of doubt, the 80’s were a time of consolidation of the gains made by the youth of the 60’s/
70’s. The young who at one time were protesting the system were part of the system in the 80’s
and they promoted stability and consolidation as the theme of the 80’s, this stability and
consolidation continued into the 90’s. So we review, we haven’t touched on the 60’s but
that was of individual growth and exploration which failed because it wasn’t connected to
society and its growth. Personal individual growth that doesn’t include society is doomed to
failure and that is the lesson of the 60’s. You must have not only personal growth but you
must connect that to society. When the personal growth failed, the youth returned to
the establishment which fueled the late 70’s and 80’s and the 90’s. a reaction to what happened
to the 60’s but they didn’t understand why they failed in the 60’s. Each generation reacting
to what happened before. The 2000’s were a decade of failure. The single worst president
in American history lead us into the type of failure that is only seen once in a hundred years.
From 2008 to today has been an attempt to reverse the disasters of the 2000’s under bush.
Because of those monumental failures, we are afraid and unsure of ourselves. We must never
forget that the public and private are intertwine. We react to the public events as much as the
personal events and the reverse is true. We connect the personal events into a public activity.
The creator of our fear and the driving of events is 9/11 and everything we do is viewed through the
prism of that day. We must let go of 9/11 or that event will hold us hostage to just saying no.
We have become a nation of no because of 9/11 and we must become a nation of yes and the only
way we can become engaged in yes is by moving on from 9/11. I liken this to the family that
has been traumatize by a shocking event, a death, and the only way the family can move on is
by laying to rest the ghost of this shocking event. We must lay 9/11 to rest or we are never
going to be free.
Now some may say, I went from one message to another, but I didn’t. I followed the
doctor/philosopher and diagnosed the illness and proscribed the cure.
We are held hostage by 9/11 and until we stopped being held hostage, we
can never move on. Simple diagnoses and simple treatment. So I used history
and philosophy to understand and diagnose this time and this place.
Now some may say that I am wrong. But offer me a better diagnoses and better
treatment. Offer me better philosophy.
Kropotkin
As I have been both sick and working like a dog, I haven’t been around much but
here we go.
Ancient philosophy (and I am about to reach Roman philosophy) is mostly about
how to live philosophy. The theory was less interesting to the ancients because
they were more about living philosophy. From Socrates and Plato flow the
Stoics, epicureans and the Sceptics. The rise of these philosophies meant to be live,
come from the ever increasing divorce or alienation of men from society. Men withdrew
from society due to a wide variety of reasons including the fact that people felt they
had no say in the society at large. That the society at large was at best, indifferent to
the people in that society and at worst actively attacking the people within the society.
The human body is a good analogy to what I am talking about. if the body (society) is
strong and the cells (individuals) within the body are strong, the body is strong and vibrant.
Now is the body seems to be strong but the cells are weakened or under attack, the body
may seem to be strong but it is compromised. Just as the society is compromised when
the individuals within that society are under attack. The society gave its individual members
cancer and that cancer spread within the society and finally that cancer killed the society.
Now the Roman society was divided into two sides, the west and the east. The west side was
Gaul and Italy and Spain and that western side was sick beyond help and finally died. The eastern
side lived on another 1000 years. Why did the west die and the east survived. I believe the
west died because the individual cells were too compromised. But that leaves us the 64,000
dollar question? what was the role of christanity in all of this? Was christanity a virus, a cure,
another disease which helped to kill the Roman west? I believe that Christanity took enough
people away from the body/society to help kill the west. Instead of helping heal the west,
the people involved in Christanity separated from society and enough separated to finally help
kill society. It is a lesson to be learned. If we have enough people separate from society, it
will first sicken then finally kill that society. You can see it right now. Millions of people
have slowly began to walk away from society. Millions of people are alienated from society just
as millions were alienated from Roman society and the end result might be the same. The body
can only survive if all the cells are working together and in unison. We don’t have that right now
and the only way to call it, is we have a cancer in America today and individuals within America
have it and if enough americans get it, we die. Simple as that. This is the diagnoses and
what is the cure?
Kropotkin
We follow and accept the principle that our inalienable rights are to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” with the pursuit of happiness
being the primary focus of life. What is this pursuit of happiness?
We pursue goods, materials, money, people and experiences.
And this pursuit is for the consumption of these items, we consume
goods, materials, money, experiences and people. We equate our happiness
with consumption. No wonder we are so in love with capitalism which is not much
more than a drug dealer, dealing consumption as its drug. We are junkies, consumption
junkies which we justify by calling it “our happiness”. This pursuit of “happiness” is
taking us to where we can justify our extreme consumption of all resources because hay,
we are just following our pursuit of “happiness”. I disagree with the basic premise that
it is our pursuit of happiness that is our goal. Nothing good comes from this pursuit of happiness
because it is based on a false idea of “our happiness”. this is one of reasons for the failure of
capitalism that it is predicated on a false idea that capitalism allows us to pursue happiness
more efficiently whereas this pursuit of happiness shouldn’t even be a goal. If we remove
this pursuit of happiness as a goal of humans and humanity, then what does it leave us?
Think about it. Take away the pursuit of happiness as a human goal and what else is there?
a useful thought exercise.
Kropotkin
Above we approached one of the three basics tenets of the declaration
of independence with thoughts toward the idea of pursuit of happiness.
Today we look at the other two, life and liberty. Life first.
Life, we have life and no one can take it away from us but that is really not
true. Life has a term limit. We each will live a short time and then, go away.
all life is like this (as far as we know right now) I shall die and you shall die and
everyone reading shall die and we are replaced by the next generation who we have
produced. The cycle of life as it were. We create the next generation who live on.
Now, we have a term limit of roughly 100 years. Not many people live past 100.
Now life in the context of the declaration means we have certain veto power over
our life but do we? We legally cannot kill ourselves. So the state does limit our
ability to really control life. The state also control certain medical aspects for example,
I have a great deal of pain from spinal issues and yet the state in its infinite wisdom, limits
the pain pills I need to control the pain. So my quality of life is greatly diminished because
of the state. I cannot control my life in ways I need to control it, so I suffer a great deal of
pain every single day. So this idea of life is very limited to what the state approves.
In many states, even for legitimate medical reasons, a women is unable to get an abortion,
thus the state controls her ability to make decisions based on what is right for her. The state
controls her quality of life. So this idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness really doesn’t
exists in terms of life and the pursuit of happiness, so what about liberty?
and once we investigate, we see that the state limits our liberty in some very dramatic
ways. So once again, the ideal of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is just that,
an ideal that is honored but not followed. If we don’t actually obey the ideal of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, then what is the point of having them listed? Just eliminate
them all together because they are wishful fantasies that have no impact in the world.
What is needed is to rewrite the declaration of independence because it no longer fits
what the modern world needs or requires. Remove the words, life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness because they are no longer needed in this modern world. Replace those
ideals with words that fit the new ideal’s, modern words that fit our institutional needs,
words like Nihilism, because we live in a nihilist world. driven by institutional nihilism that
demands that the only thing that matters is profit. And here lies your institutional nihilism,
the drive for profit. Remove the words life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness because those
words have been replaced by the nihilist ideal of profit.
Kropotkin
coming back from a mini-vacation with the wife, went to Tahoe. We have a condo
there which doesn’t have any TV or internet which is both a curse and a blessing. I had a chance
to read and finish a very interesting book called “What is ancient philosophy?” by Pierre Hadot.
His premise which I have been aiming for is the Ancients philosophize differently then we do.
Philosophy for the ancients was about a way of life. You study philosophy as a means to
a way of life. You study Plato and Aristotle and the schools of philosophy like Stoicism,
Epicureanism and Scepticism as a way of life. You study them and you immersed yourself
into that way of life. We look at philosophy and think of it as knowledge like 1+ 1= 2
or E=Mc2, or the civil war was fought from 1861 to 1865. We don’t make it a way of life as
the ancients did. That is our failure. we look at philosophy as another branch of knowledge.
When I was much younger, I turned to anarchism. I didn’t just use anarchism as knowledge,
I lived the life. I was off the grid in every way possible. I studied anarchism as a way of life,
not just as knowledge. It made all the difference in the world how I view anarchism because
I lived the life, in its possibilities. I was not a spectator in anarchism, viewing it from
an impersonal, outside looking in type of way. I was in it looking out. This is how the ancients
viewed philosophy, inside out, not outside in. christanity then took over this view of
studying the bible and studying Christ not just as knowledge, but as a way of life.
this explains why they welcomed martyrdom. The knowledge they held was not just
knowledge, but a way of life. Who among us now would sacrifice for philosophy as
the Christians sacrifice for their way of life. But the ancients philosophers did sacrifice
for their way of life, Socrates for example, because it was a way of life. We who study
philosophy now days treat it like math or science or economics. we don’t study philosophy
as a means to improve ourselves as the ancients did. They had spiritual exercises like those
in religion, how did you improve yourself today? Did you do good today? Philosophy was a means
to improve yourself. Today, are you a better person because you studied philosophy?
I would be willing to bet that for most of us, studying philosophy has had no difference
in making us better people. It is not philosophy that has failed us as I first thought, but
we have failed philosophy. We treat it like random knowledge when in fact it is meant
to be a way of life. In thinking about Nietzsche, I not sure even he understood this about
philosophy. So the question is, is philosophy for you about the knowledge or is it about
being a way of life? Decide and then your path is chosen. Simple knowledge or
becoming/having a way of life? What does philosophy mean to you?
Kropotkin
So yesterday, I wrote about philosophy being a way of life instead of just
being knowledge. Now let us take this way of life idea and extend it.
So you study and live philosophy as the ancients did, by using the philosophy
you have learned to improve yourself. by learning what the good is and then
every day trying to be good as your philosophy has taught you. You are inside
of your philosophy instead of looking in from a distance, in looking out, not out
looking in. Now let turn briefly to the idea of the meaning of life. What if this immersion
of philosophy, of living a philosophical life is the meaning of life (for some)?
Let us compare this idea to the Christian idea of the way of life.
A Christian believes that to get to heaven they must lead a Christian life.
Now this mostly means accepting and following the rules of god, you know
the ten commandments. Thou shall not take the lord’s name in vain and thou
shall not kill and thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife plus several other
commandments. So you would live your life based on these rules,
from the inside out, not the outside in. So if you say, thou shall not kill
and you don’t kill, great you are following a way of life, HOWEVER, if you
support the policeman who shot and killed someone EVEN though they were “protecting”
themselves, you are violating the commandment, thou shall not kill because it
doesn’t say, thou shall not kill unless you are threatened and then killing is ok,
no, it says THOU SHALL NOT KILL. You cannot be against killing and then
support someone else doing the killing in your name. There is no doubt as to the
commandment’s point, thou shall not kill. You cannot approve of the death penalty
in that case because thou shall not kill even if it is to protect society in some fashion.
You cannot support war because the commandment does not say, thou shall not kill unless
you are protecting your country, no it say, thou shall not kill. Either you take it seriously
or you don’t and if you support anyone killing anyone, then you do don’t accept the
commandment, thou shall not kill, and you are not, NOT, a Christian. You cannot pick and
choose which commandments you are going to follow and which you will not obey.
it is pretty much an all or nothing type of thing.
Now let us compare this to the philosopher. What rules is he going to follow like the
Christian? Not only what rules but how is he going to follow them? A philosopher must
establish which rules are rules he is going to follow and then follow them. So if you decide to
live the life of a stoic, then you must learn the rules and then follow them, live them. The
Christian is very instructive here because we can see the rules and how to follow them as it
applies to the Christian. Philosophy is suppose to make you a better person otherwise why
study philosophy? and the only way philosophy is supposed to make you a better person is to
live the life, be the person your philosophy is training you to be. Now is there a reward like
the Christian gets if the philosopher follows the rules decided on to become a better person?
NO. and that is the point. becoming a better person is its own reward and the goal of philosophy.
If the goal of philosophy is not to become a better person, then why study philosophy?
Kropotkin
