Descartes has what is felt to be the “correct” philosophical method…
He reasoned and used logic in his attempt to create certainty in
our knowledge… he create a mind experiment… what if I
can’t trust my sense and I can’t trust outside matter and what if god
is evil and making me sense or see things that lead me to have
a wrong account of the universe… what is certain?
the certainty is Cogito ego sum… I think therefore I am…
I exist because there is a I to think… therefore I exist… as a brain,
not as a physical object, but as a thinking object…
now note, at no point does this become anything more then
a mental exercise… mental masturbation if you will…there
was no real world attempt or nothing attempting to connect
his thinking with the real world, the physical world…
now I don’t object to the use of a mind experiment because
Einstein for example, used them to help create his theory of relativity
and Newton for his physics, but they still were able to connect these
mind experiments with the real world and they were able to confirm the results
of these mind experiments with real world experiments and real world results…
but Descartes does neither… his mind experiment is just that and only that…
how can we trust a mind experiment that hasn’t been at least, tested in
the real world? the philosophical method to be of value must
have some real world testing or applications…philosophy to have
value must be grounded in the real world, so how do we ground philosophy
in the real world? I have mentioned one way, which is to use our own
lives as the experiment…I did this for years when I was an anarchist…
I didn’t just have a mental argument for anarchism, I lived the life…
I lived off the grid for years… no bank accounts, no car, no paychecks,
no fixed place to stay…off the grid as best as I could… and in the
day to day of being an anarchist, I learned what it meant to be anarchist
and that in part, is why I am not an anarchist today…
I took a theory and lived it in the real world and although the
theory had promise, the time wasn’t right for anarchism and I learned
that from my years being an anarchist…if we are to better understand
a theory, we must live out that theory in our day to day lives… those who
advocate for conservatism, live your days as that and you will see the failure of
conservatism because it fails on a community, state and federal level…
you cannot have everyone live as conservatives because society will fail
and collapse… you can have everyone live as liberals because the
state/society will be fine even though the individuals within it may have
issues IE, not get everything they think they deserve like happiness and salvation…
or blow jobs…if you look at real world applications of political theory,
then you have a better sense of what is political theory we can actually exist in
and live in…if you follow current events and the drive to destroy all our institutions,
the problem with that is once you succeed, now what? By destroying our institutions,
you have destroy the means of society to carry out its wishes… in other words,
it is a return to the solitary and brutish man of Hobbes? or was it Locke? Can’t remember…
and we created society and civilization and government to avoid all that…
so we must connect theory with reality and only then can we avoid some of the
issues we are going to hit very shortly…
Kropotkin