Meta: Which ways of thinking about these questions are valid?
Meta-meta: What is thinking, and questions, and valid?
Well, to Kant, this question had a more soteriological focus. The ‘what should I do’-question is basically answered by ‘act rationally’, as according to Kant, ideal moral behavior is accessible to rational reflection—consequently, any ideal reasoner will always act morally, as acting otherwise would be acting irrationally.
However, even an ideal reasoner can only have knowledge about the natural world (his answer to the first question), and thus, the answers to many questions that have historically occupied humans—is there a God, is there an immortal soul, do we have free will and so on—are out of reach so to speak.
Nevertheless, even though we can’t know these things, we can justifiably believe in them—he thought that these things are necessary postulates to engage in moral reasoning. Through these beliefs, we may hope to achieve the supreme good, which he thought to lie beyond this life.
So I don’t think it’s exactly fair to reduce this to ‘how one should live’ (or at least, that Kant would protest). (Then again, my summary above does his arguments violence, too.)
Kant actually thought that these questions further reduce to the question ‘What is man?’, but I’m not going to try to summarize this here.
I think that the first question in particular may be an overly Western focus. Much of Western metaphysics builds on concepts like ‘substance’ and ‘distinction’, all the way down to Thales, who thought everything was water, with the distinctions between different things being like the distinctions between ice, water, and steam—just different ‘phases’ of the same underlying stuff.
But many Eastern tradition, notably those rooted in Buddhist thought, have no real concept of ‘substance’—things originate dependently, i.e. in relation to one another, they are without an absolute nature, and thus, not fundamentally distinct from one another, or even from nothing. I’m not sure that asking ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would make much sense in such a tradition.
Of course, even in the Western world, many thinkers have denied that the question has a proper object. I mean, you first have to stipulate that ‘nothing’ could exist—which already invites linguistic troubles, as ‘existence’ seems to be something that only applies to things, which nothing isn’t (clue’s in the name). All of this can be dealt with—we can deny, again with Kant, that existence is a property, or we can follow Quine’s slogan that ‘to be is to be the value of a bound variable’.
But in doing so, we’ve already moved to a meta-level: we’re not either thinking about what we should do, or about why there is something rather than nothing; rather, we’re thinking about whether these questions make sense, which is a different topic.
That’s why I think philosophy is ultimately better summarized as a sort of attitude towards the world and our being in the world, rather than a set of topics, or even a method—it’s the sort of attitude that, for any such set of topics, for any method, has you asking, sure, but why those topics? Why that method?
Hijack - You got any recommendations?
For those contemplating philosophy as a career:
Internal - Is sitting around thinking about shit all day long a valid life pursuit?
Practical - How do I make $$$ - and/or meet babes (depending on one’s priorities) - studying philosophy in an age of instant gratification?
Objective - Apart from providing employment for a limited number of people, has philosophy ever solved a single problem of significance?
HMHW - I don’t know, I don’t hear anything different. Kant may have his specific wording, but What is Man or pursuing a supreme Good, he is commenting on How to Live.
As for the Eastern side of things, it seems Buddhism is really about a Method - it is centered on How to Live. But any Eastern tradition that includes a Origin Story, or the concept of Brahman and Atman in Hinduism - those are about Why is there Something (and what is our relationship to it).
Inner Stickler - I would recommend:
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Comic Book form = Philosophy for Beginners: Amazon.com
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Basic readable history of Philosophers, their focus of thinking and how it contributed to Philosophy overall, and putting it in historical context = Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Reason. I read mine with a pen in hand and have marked it up all to heck. Amazon.com
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Best book that personalizes how to think about Philosophy = How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne: https://www.amazon.com/How-Live-Montaigne-Question-Attempts/dp/1590514831/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509665291&sr=1-1&keywords=how+to+live+a+life+of+montaigne&dpID=51D6%252B7UbayL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch I just love this book.
naita - fun, but the first question is exactly how Philosophers approach their thinking - they lay out their rules for how to interpret the Questions and then offer their system; and the second question is a classic Philosophical inquiry - what can we know?
Logic is a branch of philosophy, which has arguably contributed to the solution of every problem of significance. Advocates of public policy who present their case in contradiction to logic have (occasionally) been defeated.
I’ve always enjoyed that.
Again, ‘how to live’ is basically just ‘act rationally’; what one can hope for is in addition to that, things like an eternal life in the presence of God, basically theological in scope. Even if those hopes turned out to be unfulfilled, you should live your life the same way, so it’s a proper addition.
Also, there are many other schools of philosophy that would be skeptical of the ‘why is there something instead of nothing’-question—pragmatism, logical positivism and basically all of analytical philosophy up to the recent revival of metaphysics, and so on. So I think it’s less universal in philosophy than you seem to think.
Regarding Buddhism, I was mainly talking about its philosophical outgrowths, like the writings of Nagarjuna, and not so much its theological aspects—so Hinduism isn’t really a direct comparison. The latter’s cosmogony is much more religious than philosophical in nature, I think.
But in the end, I think all I can tell you is to examine your assumptions critically, and see if they actually apply to the subject you’re studying—in other words, do philosophy. One data point is that few people ever seem to have undertaken a classification of philosophy along your lines, for example.
I know a lot of people scoff at it, but this book is quite an accessible primer on the development of philosophical thinking.
I’m not sure if that’s a bit less of a summary than you’re looking for - part of the problem is that you want a summary that doesn’t skimp on detail - but there’s too much detail to include in a summary.
That is all a discussion of How to Live. In line with OP.
Each of those are discussions of the Dimensions of Reality. They seek to Establish the Rules with which Humans can/should be allowed to answer the Fundamental Questions.
This is part of the darn Philosophy Framework that must exist -
Humans experience 2 to 3 dimensions of reality: the Physical, our Consciousness, and some set of Ideals - some approach to how we view Numbers, Math, Truth etc. Some folks view Ideals as its own Dimension - Plato said it was the one that mattered most in answering the FQ’s - others hold that there are two Dimensions, Material and Information, which then can be split into Consciousness and othe information such as systems for different Ideals. But the bottom line is that we “filter” our our approach to how we answer the FQ’s based on what we believe is true about the Physical world, our Consciousness and Ideals. Different philosophers define each dimension differently based on their take on the classical Philosophical Inquiries: what is existence and what exists, what can we know about what exists, how should Purpose factor in, etc.
Pragmatism simply says: The dimension of Consciousness is really defined this way - say, as a byproduct of what our senses perceive and what we are practically seeking to do at the time - and therefore, Humans can only answer the FQ’s this way. So it is a specific system of Epistemology - it asserts what we can know. That’s within the context of a standard Philosophical Inquiry and in line.
To be clear: this thread is exactly that = Noodling about my assertion that a Framework must exist. On one hand, I can’t find one from any point over the thousands of years of Human Noodling; on the other hand, it seems pretty clear that there are common points of inquiry and such.
So far in my noodling including this thread, I haven’t seen anything that changes the fundamental questions. I fully accept that I have more to learn. There exercise of trying to break my assertion about the fundamentals questions is productive for me right now.
Mange, I read that when it came out too many years ago. I remember it being really enjoyable, but I didn’t retain any specifics other that it’s basic approach. Hmm, maybe I should revisit it.
Yes, that’s why I thought it important to add them. And also to point out that there are no easy answers to your title question. The framework to what philosophy is about is philosophy. Beyond stating that any philosophy revolves around examining one or more of a small set of questions that includes the aforementioned four, there is no more fundamental framework that applies to all philosophy.
So Philosophy is a manifestation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem? It is incapable of completely describing itself?
So, here is where I am at:
What is not true about this statement? Please hear that I am NOT saying that with a “Nyah, prove me wrong, bucko!!” type of tone. I am sincerely asking.
How is it about how to live if the answer makes explicitly no difference to how to live?
Yes, but this establishing of rules does not reduce to your questions, and is nevertheless part of philosophy.
I don’t see in what way we could be said to ‘experience the physical’. We experience only one thing—our experience—from which we can then, barring things like Cartesian hyperbolic doubt, infer the physical; but I don’t see in what sense we are in direct contact with the physical in the same way that we are in contact with our experience, i.e. consciousness. That’s the origin of the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena, i.e. the things themselves and our experience, or knowledge, thereof (very roughly).
Although of course, as with everything, there have been those that have questioned this ‘bifurcation of nature’, notably Whitehead, who held it to originate from a misplaced faith in the concreteness of the abstract objects of science—mistaking the map for the territory, so to speak. So if you’re a Whiteheadian, you’d probably hold that there’s no meaningful difference between ‘the physical’ and ‘consciousness’.
In a sense, this distinction—between Platonism and Aristotelian hylomorphism—is perhaps a better origin from which all of (Western) philosophy has sprung: there’s those that, with Plato, hold to the reality of some sort of ideal beyond, and those who, with Aristotle, believe everything to inhere in the here and now, encapsulated most strikingly in Raphael’s School of Athens, where we see in the center Plato pointing to the heavens beyond, while Aristotle appears to caution him to keep his feet on the ground. (And surrounding them, the founding fathers of most Western schools of thought; indeed, perhaps this painting comes as close to the diagram you’ve been looking for as one can get.)
I’m no expert on pragmatism, but AIUI, its central tenet basically is that beliefs are not evaluated according to their truth or falsity, but rather, according to their usefulness—and thus, grand metaphysical speculation on why anything exists would seem to be rather anathema to the approach, arguably being supremely useless after all.
There are certainly common points, yes, but that doesn’t imply the existence of some overarching, all-encompassing framework. That’s why I pointed to Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance above—there may not be any single unifying feature that runs through everything that could be called ‘philosophy’, but rather, it may be unified by some set of overlapping similarities. Indeed, presuming a single unifying characterization may ultimately be neither necessary, nor even possible, and hamper further discussion (which is sometimes called the Socratic fallacy, to toss around some more big names to impress everyone with my edumacation).
Well, Gödel’s theorem applies to formal systems capable of axiomatizing arithmetics, which philosophy isn’t. But it may be a similar kind of phenomenon: as soon as you give a definition of philosophy, we can philosophize about that definition, which will not be covered by said definition.
I’ve said what I believe not to be true about it: philosophy is an attitude, rather than a set of topics; it can’t ultimately be reduced to any single set of questions; different questions would not even have made sense within different philosophical systems; we don’t experience the physical, of if we do, there’s no distinction to the conscious; and well, all that other stuff.
This isn’t me trying to knock you down, btw.; I’m answering in as genuine and hopefully open-minded a manner as you’re asking. In a sense, I just think that the utility of keeping things vague and kinda-sorta is often underestimated: we tend to believe that the world falls into neatly delineated categories, but on the whole, it just doesn’t, and when we force it into our categories, all we really do in the end is cutting corners.
Yes, I appreciate your intentions and explanations, as always. I am trying to come at this from an open-minded place as well. Let me ponder this stuff.
To keep things moving, let’s start with the first bit:
I understood you to be saying that Kant says one can judge one’s actions by whether they are rational in pursuit of a positive afterlife with God. If I have that incorrect, sorry. Isn’t that How to Live? If his Categorical Imperative is a variation of Do Unto Others…isn’t that How to Live?
The categorical imperative (which is different from the golden rule in that it eliminates the subjective aspect, rather framing things in terms of universal rule) is something according to which a rational actor would act; but through these actions, the actor may hope (i.e. be entitled to rationally expect) an eternal afterlife.
The key word here, I think, is may: you can hope, for example, to find a check over a million dollars lying in the street; but it’s not something you’d be reasonable in hoping for. On the contrary, Kant says (I think) that the actor following the categorical imperative (which she does, because she is rational, not to attain eternal life) is justified in hoping for eternal life. So the question is something more along the lines of, ‘what am I justified in expecting?’.
The ‘how’ of living is given by reason; but given that you are a reasonable actor living in that way, you’re justified in believing that it’ll lead to a rewarding afterlife.
First of all: cool. Info about Kant! Thank you.
Second of all: aren’t you basically summarizing what Kant has to say about How to Live?
I’m not sure how to answer that without seeming snippy. Again: the how is given by ‘according to reason’. That’s it. All that other stuff is extra. So no, I’m not.
You don’t seem snippy at all. I am clearly a blockhead. I am not sure what I am not seeing.
I think what I am hearing you say is: If someone asks Kant “how should I live?” he would reply “according to reason, with some choices you can make along the way” - wouldn’t he?
Are saying that really isn’t a specific response to How to Live because it leaves things wide open?
Perhaps, as a sort of caricature, think about it this way: given that I live a life according to reason, I might get a gold watch; or a box of chocolates; or a million bucks; or perhaps, bugger all, because I really just should’ve stopped to smell the roses every once in a while. Point is, even given a ‘how to’ live your life, there’s a further question here, which is not fixed merely by that ‘how’. And it’s something one can ruminate on, and, according to Kant, if one does, then one’s going to find that it’s not justified to expect a gold watch or a box of chocolates, but it is justified to expect a rewarding afterlife.
(It’s not quite that clear cut, actually, and someone who actually knows their Kant would probably smack me upside the head for the above; but it’ll do as a toy model for how there could arguably be leftover facts to fix even after one’s done with the ‘how’.)
No, I’m saying that there’s a question left after giving the ‘how to’—the ‘what may I hope’ question. Consequently, Kant’s philosophy isn’t exhausted by your two fundamental questions, at least as far as I can see.