Philosophy: love of wisdom…
Love is pursued so love of wisdom means we pursue wisdom…
we find wisdom within knowledge, within experience, within facts…
with these things, knowledge, experience, facts, we are attempting to
discover or interpret this knowledge into wisdom…
all humans die… this is wisdom gained from knowledge, experience, facts…
but what does it mean to face death as a human? for example, I don’t believe
in an afterlife… I think when you die, its just like falling asleep but there are no dreams,
just the silence of being dead with no sensory input going into the body, so the
body becomes unaware and silent…but what wisdom do I gain with this knowledge?
I gain the wisdom not to fear death… it will happen regardless of what I think about
it…when I was much younger, I had an crisis of the soul… somewhere in my twenties,
I became aware of death, not as a abstract theory that the young have, but as a real
question of human existence…I was haunted by the thought I was going to die…
one might call it a spiritual crisis…this crisis took a long time to resolve itself…
but the wisdom I gained from this crisis has been crucial to my understanding of
the world… I gained wisdom from knowledge, experience, facts…I gave up the
traditional beliefs in the metaphysics, god… heaven… hell…angels…the
resurrection and became an atheist many years after my initial crisis but that
crisis helped shape who I am and what I believe about the world… I gained
wisdom… I followed the path of philosophy (even though I didn’t know it at the time)
going from experience to wisdom…
now, in terms of Nietzsche, I overcame, I reevaluated the values of the society
with its focus on spiritual matters…
but what about a believer, a true believer…
a true believer believes they already have the truth,
that they already have wisdom…now this truth might
be religious in nature but it may also be political in nature…
there is a god thinks the religious believer…
there is no greater political system then democracy…
there is no greater economic system then capitalism…
these beliefs are core beliefs that constitute part of a belief system…
so for one who believes that they already hold the truth, that they
already holds wisdom… what do they do with new, incoming knowledge,
new experiences or new facts…they already believe they hold the truth,
they hold wisdom already… what they do with these new facts or new knowledge
is to use these to confirm their core belief system…
so stated in another way, they used facts or knowledge to confirm
already held biases, ism’s, ideologies or paradigms…
god exists… so the way the solar system circles and is a
very rational system is proof of god’s existence…
evidence is used to bolster one’s already held biases and ism’s…
ok, so the search for wisdom doesn’t exist for the true believer because
they already believe they have true knowledge, true wisdom, the truth…
the value of facts and evidence for the true believer is to find support for
their particular ism, bias, ideology…
the so called war between science and faith is really not that science can’t deal
with faith, but that faith can’t deal with science… because science can
show us facts, evidence, experiences that contradicts the “wisdom” of the
true believer…if the earth is 13 billion years old, it contradicts the
“knowledge” of the believer and so to maintain their beliefs, the believer
attacks science and its facts and evidence and experiences…
this is the reason for the war against science… the attack on science
in regards to global warming and evolution and physics is because
faith cannot deal with new facts or evidence that might contradict
faith… this is just as true with the true believer of any ism or ideology,
or paradigm be it religious or be it political or be it social…
this is why those of the true believers of capitalism attacks with such vigor
those who argue against capitalism… because the faith of capitalism
is no different then the faith in god and with the same amount of evidence for
either belief system…
the value of facts, knowledge, experiences for the true believer is to
maintain and support of the belief system… but that is not a search
for wisdom… it is not philosophy… it is religion and nothing more then
religion to use wisdom to confirm one’s bias, ism, ideologies…
Kropotkin