the depth and quality arise in our age due to the experiences
of the last 150 years… from the deaths of millions in WW1 to the
concentration camps of the Holocaust and the deaths of millions more
during WW2…how can we have sterile discussions of how our knowledge
is exists in certainty like Descartes does when in the background places
like Auschwitz existed…it has been 73 years since Auschwitz was closed
and yet it still exists as experience in our collective conscience…
and the deaths of those millions in those wars of extermination still
exists in our collective conscience…and the most philosophers offer
is a deconstruction of text… if philosophy will not engage in events…
experiences that have become who we are, then philosophy deserves to
fade into nothingness…we philosophers, we who talk of how is knowledge certain
or how language games gives us texture to philosophical texts… and we fail
as human beings by not fully engaging in matters of experiences like the
the Holocaust or the violence that is war…
to be a philosopher is to engage in the matters of life, of experiences that
collectively has made us, us…and we are social creatures of the collective
and what experiences of the collective impacts us as individuals…we share
in society collective beliefs and traumas and highs and lows that the society
experiences…it is not enough to call for morality of our human beings when
we haven’t faced the trauma of 9/11 and faced it squarely as philosophers
when face with experiences… we must explain experiences and turn them
into a source of a guide, a map of who we are and where we want to be…
9/11 effect has been to turn the U.S into a fear ridden society…
and fear has driven every single decision we have made since then…
and fear is a lousy way to make decisions… make a decision from
fear and chances are that decision will be a bad one because
that is what fear does… it drives people into making bad decisions…
Germany got Hitler from being driven by fear… we are on the same path
with IQ45…we philosophers haven’t come to grips with the events of the
last 118 years… not the science, not the political events, not the social events,
… we talk of the deconstruction of the text as if that has something to do with
life… it doesn’t… it is sterile and pointless… we talk of the language games
and what does that has to do with our lives as we have experienced it in the last
118 years or since 1900…nothing…we haven’t come to grips about the deaths
in either World War and we haven’t come to grips with the rise of the Nazi’s and we
haven’t come to grips with the Holocaust and its aftermath…we have fled
from our responsibilities and we have failed…we talk about metaphysics
and we ignore the reality of experience…our collective experience of
the World Wars and of the violent deaths of Vietnam and other such experiences
that lay upon the heart of the land…we cannot move on past these trauma’s
until we come to grips with them… we are survivors of trauma and how does
any survivor learn to cope with their trauma? they talk about it, they discuss it…
they cry and they experience it in the ways necessary to overcome the trauma…
we have post traumatic syndrome and we don’t even know it…and until we come
face to face with the trauma, we cannot overcome it…we still exist
with 9/11 and until we come to grips with it, it will continue to haunt us…
as we continue to exists with the World Wars and the Holocaust because we
haven’t come to grips with it… we have failed and we will continue to fail
until we overcome our trauma…but one may say, that is psychology, not
philosophy… haven’t you learned yet… there is no separation between things…
everything is connected…and once we understand that we are our experiences
and we are our events and we are our knowledge…we are one with those
experiences that we have had, both past, present… and we will become
those future events/experiences…and they will be added to who we are…
we are our experiences both individually and collectively… that is who we are…
experiences make us who we are… to exist, to experience is to understand…
Kropotkin