we return to Kant and his questions…
- what can I know?
2.what ought I do?
- what may I hope?
now we also have Kant’s three thoughts…
god, freedom and immortality…
so, how do we know god, freedom, immortality?
how are Kant’s three point relevant to “what ought I do”
and “what may I hope”…
now if we take Hume seriously, then we cannot “know” any of these
concepts of god, freedom or immortality… for Hume has shown us,
that knowledge of these concepts is not possible…all knowledge
Hume argues is only possible by experience and god, freedom and
immortality lies outside of our experience…
god, freedom and immortality are metaphysical concepts…
they exists outside of physical experience…(now one may argue that
freedom isn’t outside of experience, but for the moment let us assume that freedom
is a metaphysical concept)
so, what can I know? In light of Hume, we realize that our knowledge
is limited… we have limited senses and limited ability to
understand what our senses tell us, so we are in fact, limited to
the extent of our knowledge…I can tell you, know, that I am in the
kitchen, writing on the dinning room table because that is the only spot
in the house I can write in…we have this limited amount of knowledge…
now according to Hume, we cannot have any other knowledge beyond
simple, basic knowledge like my sitting at the kitchen table…
we cannot have metaphysical knowledge because that knowledge exists
outside of our sensory ability, outside of our senses, outside of our
experience…as the knowledge of god, freedom and immortality
lie outside of our senses…
so, this question of what can I know? Is a limited one, we
can know what the senses and experience tells us and as we
have limited senses and can only have limited experiences,
we are limited in our knowledge………
so we face Kant’s second question, what ought I do?
this is an rather open ended question…… what ought I do in regards to, what?
the answer to this question seems to lie outside of the question…
so we try to understand this question in terms of, let us try possibilities,
what ought we do given our possibilities?
so now we have to understand what is possible for a human being?
at any given time, we have different possibilities… for example, at age
18, I could and did, run a marathon… at 59, not so much, I can drive 26 miles,
but I doubt I could walk or even bike ride 26 miles… so at different ages, what
is possible for me changes…
my thoughts of today, weren’t possible at 20 because I needed time to
reflect upon and read about and live the possibilities we have…
and the years of reading and thinking make it possible to have the thoughts
I have today… my wilderness years as I like to call them…
due to my experience, I avoid the mistakes of youth… I can see, spot
trouble before it ever comes near me, and I can avoid it……
and that is due to my age and experience… in my youth, I made
plenty of mistakes… mistakes I could have avoided if I was a little
more experienced… but that is how we become wise… the wiser
the man, the greater the fuck ups he has had…kinda good rule of the thumb…
a wise man has fucked up enough to have learned from his mistakes…
an unwise man still hasn’t learned from his mistakes…
so, fuck ups are the key to becoming wise… and the moral of this
story is to fuck up and often………
so anyway, what ought I do?
let us think about this ……
Kropotkin