I have a thought… human beings purpose is happiness…
is that a philosophy? No, it is an opinion, but certainly not
a philosophy… what does it need to become a philosophy?
just as I had my lone, single rock, I have this lone, single thought…
To make sense of it, I must compare and contrast it to similar thoughts.
So I spend my days, looking through dense pages of other philosophy and
other writings to compare and contrast my thought…I spend my days
seeing what other writers thought about the purpose of humans is
in being happy… as I read, I see it depends on whether the writer
in question is religious or not… the religious ones tend to disagree with
the basic premise that human existence is about happiness…ummmmm,
premise… isn’t that kinda like a hypotheses… a scientific hypotheses…
so, when I offer up a philosophical premise, it is kinda like a scientific hypotheses…
now, a scientific person would then try to test this theory…
how would you test this theory that the purpose of human existence is happiness?
and therein lies the philosophical problem… a philosophical person wouldn’t
try to test this theory that the purpose of human existence is happiness…
a philosophical person would try to reason it out… create arguments and counter
arguments (the philosophical method) to attempt to solve this issue of whether
the purpose of human existence is happiness…the idea is the philosophical method
is about rational arguments for or against a particular position… the scientific method
would go about and create an experiment to prove or disprove the theory/theses/premise…
so let us take out our scientific hat and think about a way to create a experiment to
prove or disprove our theses that the purpose of human beings is happiness…
now we reach Nietzsche… Nietzsche, you say… Nietzsche wasn’t a scientist…
nope, he wasn’t… what the hell does Nietzsche have to do with this? if you read
Nietzsche and I have… he often points out that life is an experiment…
What if, what if we conduct our experiment, our scientific experiment
on the question if the human being purpose is happiness, on ourselves…
this is what Nietzsche did in fact… he conducted his life as an experiment…
so instead of logical reasoning attempting to discover if the purpose of human beings
is happiness, we engage in that experiment ourselves… in your personal experience,
is the purpose of human beings to find happiness?
we engage in our lives to discover philosophical truths… we use our lives
as experiments in understanding what is the fundamental “truths” of our human
existence…the experiment we conduct is upon ourselves and the answers we
find we report to the world… this however means no more sleepwalking
through our lives as we have been… we are scientists engage in a experiment
and we must devote our time and energy trying to understand how our experiment
is going… that is how we convert a philosophical method into a scientific method…
we use our lives as the experiment…instead of just reasoning our way into a truth,
we live our way into the truth…a radical difference…
Kropotkin