Monday, March 2, 2009
Philosophhy of nothingness
Lately, I have felt more and more that philosophy makes up two distinct parts. One, which is purely analytical without any preconcieved understanding but rather just building on pure stimuli we get from the surrounding, where logic plays a secondary role. The other one is what I call the philosophy of nothingness, thus, the topic. This philosophy is the main stream philosophy dealing with justice, morality, dignity or other such abstract notions.The reason I call it nothingness because it is literally about nothing. Everybody has been going on and on for millenia what justice, love or any such abstract notions are and everybody thinks they have right, yet, building a consensus has been impossible. There are two parts to it. First, the notion that there is essentially something very basic or metaphysical about these concepts which needs to be discovered. While, the other part includes coming up with a good argument about a particular understanding of what these concepts are. I think there is a fundamental flaw in this philosophy because it holds two paradoxes in its bossom. One, if we are to discover any of these concepts like JLM (Justice, Love, morality) how do we know they already exist. Its like saying unicorns exist but just need to discover them. If something is to be discovered how can we know about it? The other paradox is more interesting; at least, for me. Philosophy is all about coming up withbetter arguments or/and better defining concepts. This methodology apparently does the following jobs: give a better understanding of the concept and forge a consensus. I contend, these two things are intertwined. When are philosopher is trying to 'better' define a concept, he or she is just trying to bring into the fold of defintion more people's understanding. Mind you, this process does not involve coming up with new understandings, it just includes more person's understanding. As a philosopher brings more understandings in the fold, he builds consensus. For example, lets suppose there are three people in the entire world and they are philosiphizing chair. Lets say A thinks chair is something with a wooden flat base on top of four legs. B thinks that chair is black and is made out of metal. The philosophy would give a better argument for and define chair, which would include both the understandings of chair, thus, solving the problem. This does not mean the concept of chair was discovered. The defintion was just vague enough and specific enough to define chair. This is something we need to do with justice or any other abstract topic. Therefore, at the hypothetical peak of philosophy, when philosophical problems do not exist any more, no friction is presented to a problem. Therefore, this shows that philosophy feeds on contradictions and it ceases when there is consensus. In other words, philosophy is about building concensus. This does not mean, there are any metaphysical concepts like JLM, all it means that we as human race just need to come up with a suitable understanding, and just start believing in it, instead of finding more basic because there is nothing metaphysical bases of these concepts. We give these words understandings. If there is any origin, it is us, nothing else.A weird, yet interesting, aspect of the philosophers of nothingness is that even do not know when to stop with their philosophy. They do not know what is the end point of philosophies of morality or justice or love. One question which any phinone (philosopher of nothingness) would evade is how do you know you have reached the right answer?By no means, am I, contending that certain actions which are characterized as 'just' actions or feelings associated with 'love' do not exist. The whole point is that characterizing different actions under one label creates problems like the ones we have not been able to solve for centuries. And, this is exactly, how philosophy of nothingness arises. All these philosophical concepts like JLM are a criteria of certain actions. This criteria promises to not only explain the actions which we associate with thoes words but also be able to tell us any future actions which might arise due to change in circumstances. Lets assume for a second we could just forget there are any theories of justice and other people have any concept of justice. How would we come up our definition or understanding of justice? Simply, we would look at the actions we deem just and then try to find a common theme running through all these actions, make it conspicuous and put that into words. And, voila! we have self tailored definition of justice. However, to make it more sellable, we would have to include the understanding of the justice of our audiences to make it more pallatable. And once, we have incorporated all people's understanding and considered people who deviate radically from our understanding as "mad" we would have turned into a perfect philosopher. *unfinished*
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