So I have in the last post, suggested that the reason Philosophy has lost its
influence is because philosophy has lost its way…
Philosophy is the love of wisdom… wisdom…
what is wisdom and how do we find it and what do we do with it
once we find it… these are the essential questions of philosophy…
for Kant his question was: How are synthetic a priori questions possible?
For Descartes his question was: what can we know for absolutely certain?
what knowledge can we know for certain?
and I ask? how are these two questions leading us to wisdom?..
you may say, that they are wisdom of sorts… perhaps, but wisdom of such
a narrow type as to be almost useless in every day life…
I ask: what is wisdom and how do we find it and what do we do with it once
we find it?
That is the first true philosophical question asked in a very long time…
so what is wisdom? from my handing dandy dictionary:
Wisdom: the quality of being wise; good judgement, Learning; knowledge…
ok, let us look up wise… Wise: having or showing good judgement… informed, none the wiser,
learned… shrewd, cunning…
here even the dictionary makes the same basic mistake philosophers make which is
thinking that knowledge makes on wise…how does the knowledge that the sun is
93 million miles from earth makes one wise?
it is a fact and facts have that tendency be proven wrong and must be changed…
in fact, it is true that the sun isn’t really 93 million miles from earth… as the earth moves
sometimes it is closer then 93 million miles and sometimes due to the earth movement it is
more then 93 million miles from earth and we still haven’t figured out how knowing this
makes us wise…
think of the wisest person you ever met… did that person have the most knowledge?
or did that person know what to do with that knowledge? Wisdom is really the
knowing what to do with knowledge, not necessarily having the most knowledge…
wisdom is really a value knowing what to do with knowledge…
being wise is taking knowledge and putting it to the best possible us to humans…
which knowledge, one might ask? I am inclined to think that true wisdom is not book
wisdom but wisdom gained from knowledge and experience…
the true teacher of wisdom is experience… and how to rightly make the best
use of experience… I am wise now because as I see situations, I know which ones
are going to create problems for me and I avoid those situations… I gained that
knowledge from experience… and that experience knowledge is aided by
book knowledge and more formal learning…
I know that the U.S trying to invade other countries is doomed to failure
and will destroy the U.S is because I know that is exactly what destroyed
Athens… Athens overreached in invading other places and by doing so,
wasted so much money and manpower and energy. Athens had no backup
plan or reserve money, manpower or energy… and so when
it overreached, it fell, Athens had nothing left to give and so it fell to earth…
and lost its status as the leading Greek state… I can see the U.S following this path right
down to its conclusion…and I am wiser then those who advocate invading other countries
for this reason…wisdom is not an absolute understanding of what needs to be done…
but a conditional understanding and thus we cannot make any solid rules about being wise
because wisdom, having wisdom changes with every situation… some are wise in this situation
and not so wise in other situations and with every experience the wisdom needed to solve
that experience, to solve the problem of a given situation changes… and that is the second
aspect of wisdom… the ability to solve problems… so we have wisdom being
an understanding of the situation AND the ability to solve problems in a given situation…
for we humans are a problem solving creature and having wisdom helps us to solve problems
and this is in part the value of having wisdom, to solve problems…
so to properly understand the philosophical situation, we have becomes divorced from
philosophy because we have lost track of what is really important in philosophy which is
an understanding of wisdom and how do we gain wisdom and what do we use our wisdom on
and how do we solve problems with the wisdom we gain?
this is philosophy…
Kropotkin