Never before in history has the appreciation of the narrowness of the truth become so critically important, owing to the widespread political and economic crises all over the world due to the collective confusion caused by various extreme worldviews, extreme life views, and extreme religious views.
Actually, all extreme ways of thinking belong to a more general family of partial ways of thinking, and all partial ways of thinking share one commonplace: slipping off the narrow path of the truth from one side or the other. As a couple of examples, when people embrace the automation and AI, they tend to ignore the potential replacement of humans from the market by machines; when people get excited about the progress in longevity medication, they tend to ignore the potentially intensified struggles for reproduction rights and survival rights on this globe. But those ignored effects will definitely come to get the population of the world when those technological dreams become true.
One important reason why we are more and more negatively impacted by the partial or extreme ways of thinking is that our mainstream philosophy has not evolved as our civilization evolves in other areas. Although the coexistence of a variety of philosophical theories might create an illusion of sufficient supply of philosophy in modern societies, without the continuous evolutionary advance, none of the existing philosophies could provide a way of thinking that would match the rapid development of our civilization in all other areas. This would create a dangerous situation not only for the global environment but also for the wellbeing of every community since no one can think without being influenced by the mainstream philosophy of his own community. This situation has been described by someone as a weak brain with quick and strong hands and feet, which is not only awkward but also dangerous, especially when some of the hands holding drugs and some others holding nuclear bombs.
Although the current situation of widespread crises around the world is rooted in the out-of-date status of the mainstream philosophy, we cannot expect the help from the community of professional philosophy for this crisis, just as attested by the fact that we have not got any help from them so far. This is because the backwardness of the mainstream philosophy is caused by some crisis within that professional discipline itself, which is in turn caused by a multidimensional structural failure that could not be saved by pure academic efforts within that discipline, no matter the promotion of new ideas or the development of new theories. The extremely complicated cause for that failure can be simply summarized into the following points:
- The lack of hard criterion of true values
As an ancient discipline for the love of wisdom, philosophy lacks hard criterion of true values like those in natural sciences or intuitive criterion of values like those in all other fields of arts. The hardest rule for philosophy would be logic; however, logic could only help to identify mistakes in a theory, in addition to helping the readers to delve into the exposition of the theory, but cannot, by itself alone, help the appreciation of the ultimate value of philosophy, which is wisdom.
That lack of hard criterion of true values itself is not a bad thing or good thing, but just part of the nature of philosophy. As a matter of fact, the very reason that philosophy could serve as the foundation of the whole civilization is because it lacks hard criterion of true values. However, that very nature of philosophy leaves a chance for fake values to take the place of true values, and there is no simple acute remedy for this problem from within the professional discipline, while the world is badly suffering from the backwardness of mainstream philosophy.
- True wisdom versus writing aptitude and knowledge of history
The problem of lacking hard criterion of true values has been manifested in such a way that today we have many philosophers who are extremely talented at literary writing and extremely knowledgeable about the commentaries of the past theories or stories of past philosophers, but overall, we have a poor philosophical system that was announced as “ended” in the middle of last century by Heidegger, a famous philosopher, and then echoed by the famous physicist Hawking a few years ago with his statement of “Philosophy is dead”. This is because, unlike the abstract wisdom, impressive writing skills and historical knowledge can all be considered as hard criteria, and humans always seek hard criteria for determining the winners in any structural power struggle.
- Other causes
The above two causes have also spawned some other causes (e.g. educational defects, disconnection from the world, futile arguments) for the crisis within the professional philosophy, and altogether they would make it very hard for people to save the discipline from within. Therefore, we cannot count on that professional community to solve the current crisis; rather, rescuing that professional discipline has to be one of the social tasks for battling the philosophically rooted global cultural, environmental, economic, and political crises.
Closing Remark
Because of the above said causes, any revolutionary change of mainstream philosophy has to happen in the open society without being controlled by the closed-door power struggle within that professional discipline.
更多我的博客文章>>>
