if you look at history… you can see a flow to it…
it just takes time and study to see it…
if the medieval man wanted answers, he referred to authority, be it the bible or
one of the Saints, like Augustine or the church itself or the pope…
the starting point of searching for answers began with some authority
and then seeing what authority said about something…
this cycle of looking for answers in authority was over a thousand years old…
then came Luther…he only wanted to reform the church… he had not intention of
of tearing the church apart, he just wanted the church to become more
responsive to the needs of the people…
one of the points of this theology revolution was that people could find the
truth, the theology truth of religion and god by themselves… they didn’t need
authority to discover the truth… all they needed was the bible and this was one of
Luther main idea’s… which is to make the bible accessible to everyone… which means
having the bible in the language of the people and not in Latin…because Latin was
the language of the elite and not the common people…
this idea that human beings can find the truth by themselves began
in religion… theology…
the first people to expand this thought beyond religion, theology was
the scientist…now Luther lived from 1483-1546 with his 95 thesis
being posted in 1517…the scientist who began to expand Luther idea
was Copernicus who live from 1473-1543… he started this idea of the scientist
not looking toward authority for answers… in science that meant not looking
toward Aristotle…Copernicus then came Kepler 1571-1630 and
then Galileo 1564-1642… each of them didn’t look to authority like
the medieval man, but they looked at nature itself… and they began to
reason out what the universe was and didn’t depend on authority to tell them…
the first philosopher who tried this was Descartes… 1596-1650…
although Hobbes was born first, 1588-1679… he didn’t begin writing
philosophy until his 40’s, thus he came after Descartes…now philosophers
begin to think for themselves and not go to authority for answers…
so you have this trend first beginning in religion, then science, then philosophy…
the trend of not depending on authority for your answers but looking for them
with your own eyes, with your own reason… Luther began this…
with each passing generation, this trend of not looking to authority for answers
became more pronounced, with the rise of the enlightenment, this trend
became dominant…it was one of the bywords of the enlightenment,
don’t trust authority, but look for yourself to see your answers…
find the experience and then make your own judgments about that experience…
the modern history of philosophy is nothing more then this… instead of looking toward
authority for answers, look for yourself and make your own Judgment…
philosophy and science for that matter followed the path of looking for yourself
to see your answers…
but there came a time when there was a problem, 1900…
Einstein created answers that were outside of the realm of
experiences…you can’t experiences the speed of light,
you can’t experience the movement he described…
more and more as the 20th century progressed came experiences
that we couldn’t experience for ourselves… World War One,
then came World War Two and the equal experience of the Holocaust…
Science equally created knowledge that we couldn’t experience…
and it is still creating experiences that we cannot ourselves experience…
Relativity to Heisenberg Uncertainty principle to quantum theory to
the superstring theory to a holographic universe…we cannot experience these
things for ourselves…we must take the scientist word that these things exist…
the common man can no longer follow the scientist and the philosopher
and experience these things…
the enlightenment basic point was to understand the universe through
our own experiences and our own reason… but we cannot do that any
longer, for we cannot experience our universe the same way anymore…
and we cannot reason about it the same way anymore…
we have become estranged from our enlightenment past…
but the enlightenment has done its work in the fact, we cannot
return to the medieval way of resorting to authority as our
guide for answers… so we cannot use authority and we cannot
use experience…
this is the crisis of the modern man… we cannot use authority and
we cannot understand experiences… first we must experience and then
we can understand… that is the human way…
now what?
Kropotkin