I was thinking about Plato the other day and I recall that above
the doors of his academy is this saying: let no one ignorant of geometry enter these doors…
it got me to thinking…why Geometry? is this really the proper way to enter
philosophy? a mathematical skill? I would argue that instead of
a mathematical skill, one should actually be versed in other things…
among them is poetry and fiction and living life…
philosophy is about life and life is not about a mathematical skill…
but life is about living…so I ask again, why Geometry? it is suppose to
aid in the development of being able to reason… but is life really about
cold logic and reasoning? so much about life is as far away from reasoning
as one could get and such schools as existentialism and writers such as Nietzsche
and Kierkegaard and Sartre approach philosophy, not from a cold logic and reasoning
standpoint of thinking about life, not from a mathematical standpoint which is
Plato’s idea but they approached philosophy from a understanding that life is
not logical and about reasoning, but life is about the act of living, a life is about
faith and love and hope as Kierkegaard noted… and faith and love and hope is not
logical and not about reasoning and not mathematical…
our day to day existence is not mathematical or logical… it is about
surviving this day any way we can and logic and math isn’t going to help
us survive this day, but hope and love and faith are far better tools for
surviving our days then math and logic and reasoning…
and that is what this is really all about, the tools one needs to survive
the day and at the end of the day, whatever tools are needed to make it to
another day are good tools…
logic and math and reasoning are like hope and faith and love… in the end,
they are just tools we use to make it to another day…
today, to survive I might need logic and tomorrow I might need love
and the next day, I might need math and reasoning and the next day,
faith and hope… the events dictate what tools I need to survive the day…
life is about situational tools… what tool or tools, do I need today to get through the day…
so what is the answer here?.. depends on the question or questions you ask…
Kropotkin