Don’t have a lot of time today as I have to be at work in an hour…
So last time, I was forced to deny philosophy the ability to use
science as a means of justifying philosophy…
because science is about descriptive statements, the world is…and
philosophy is about normative statements, the world ought to…
what if I am wrong… what shall I do to better understand this situation?
perhaps philosophy is really descriptive?
we can use descriptive words to understand the concept of justice…
Justice in America has several part… we have the judicial system, we have a
police aspect and a punishment aspect… the judicial system works like this…
and all of this is descriptive… its tell us how the justice system is and that is descriptive…
however that is theory, the abstract theory of the American judicial system…
it is very descriptive and completely useless because it doesn’t reach the reality
of the American judicial system… once you make a value judgment about
the American judicial system, you have made a normative statement,
a value judgment …
let us look at the very word philosophy: love of wisdom…
love of wisdom; it is wisdom we are pursuing,…so how do we get wisdom
and what is wisdom?
sometimes in the day to day and little battles we have on ILP, we forget the goal
which is wisdom and what it is and what method do we use to gain wisdom?
and in this we have followed the example of science, we are trying to make
philosophy like science in our attempts to find wisdom… thinking that
science seems to be a fairly rigorous means to gain wisdom… science is not wisdom however,
science is a descriptive method to gain knowledge about the universe and this creature
called a human being…
a descriptive method… this is important to note… science pursues facts, information,
knowledge… but it doesn’t pursues wisdom… what wisdom is, is a value judgment…
he is wise… we have a value judgement here, not a descriptive statement…
so we have plenty of facts about the universe but how do we turn those facts into
wisdom? facts are apples and wisdom are oranges… there is no real way to
use one to inform the other…
so we have to abandon science as a method for philosophy to follow in its pursuit
of wisdom…
method here meaning just that, a method, an example to be followed, a tool,
how does a tool lead us to wisdom? I can gain wisdom by using a tool if I use
a hammer and hit my finger while hammering, and I gain the wisdom of
not ever hammering my finger again… but is that really wisdom?
does that give us real information about wisdom? so
so should philosophy follow such models like history or economics
or anthropology? they to also make value judgements and thus
aren’t really the path for philosophy to follow?
so how do we bring philosophy back to the pursuit of wisdom and what
method would we use to pursue wisdom?
I have an idea but let us first explore this idea better…
however later as I must go to work… a 4 letter word if I have ever heard one…
Kropotkin