A Bear – Poles Apart

Philosophy is not a game. The quest for truth must be taken seriously while enjoying it. In any search a sense of direction is almost always a requirement. Sure, you might stumble on what you are looking for when arbitrarily glancing here, then there, randomly lifting a stone in the road while leaving all the others, peeking in through a window you happen to pass and knocking on a random door. You might find it by chance but it’s quite unlikely. Clearly, it’s better to be systematic, covering an area with unswerving attention, and follow the path to the end before you switch to the next.

But the different paths look quite similar, don’t they? One philosopher reminds you of another, of several others, in fact, and it’s tempting and amusing to treat alike what looks alike, and above all, it’s so easy to do it since precision is no longer needed. The teacher also seems to encourage these freethinking exercises of juggling any ideas in the air and pretend to catch them when they fall. One might as well have garbage cans ready for those ideas, for when they are taken out of context, they have lost their value.

When reading philosophy, we must be willing to go along on a journey and join the philosopher on the track he has paved for us. He may lead us astray, but that we don’t know until we have followed him to the end and grasped his argument; we can accept it or reject it, but work is required on our part.

If philosophy is a game, the truth loses its meaning. Philosophy is the love of wisdom and truth but reducing it to a game means abandoning that purpose. Any conclusion seems as good as any other and blatant contradictions are accepted because they all sound like good sports. Then it’s better not to do philosophy at all and at least avoid moving away from the truth.

We now know better. We look at the past and laugh. Even our own past, just a few years back, we smile at indulgently in light of the improved knowledge that time has given us. No one thinks like that anymore. If we don’t remember what we used to say and think, and that is more likely, we are just comfortably in tune with the time half believing that everyone else just happens to imitate us.

Couple this with the widespread relativism of today, and we get an impossible mixture of self-satisfied insistence and indifference: I am right, the times are right, and nothing is right.

There is just no self-evident reason to believe in the progress of ideas, but many people seem to take it for granted. Science develops and new technology appears, but the search for truth does not run parallel to such superficial occurrences. Maybe most of it is a distraction; maybe the medieval period was closer to realizing the truth, or maybe the Greeks got it right or the ancient Chinese.

Is it likely that we are living in the best time of history? Simple probability speaks against it, unless we just assume that everything always gets better. But to believe that we are obliged to deny even our recent past. We must forget our thoughts from yesterday when things looked so different.

Looking back at news reports from just a few years back, not to mention decades ago, reveals a world that had different concerns and a different perception of what was relevant. It is as outdated as the fashionable clothes we used to wear that we now find quite unattractive.

We find ourselves in a present unconnected to the past and we approve of it without making comparisons. What is, just is, and so it must be right.

It’s astonishing how people change. On one hand, we are creatures of habit programmed to repeat our routines day after day in the same manner and with the same phrases, but yet people are capable of changing even some of their more important inclinations.

The times change. A new generation has a different outlook than the previous one and going back a hundred or two hundred years we get reports of very different people. Looking many centuries back we may wonder if our ancestors were people at all. However, it’s not the case that each generation is a break with what was before; it grows up more or less in line with their parents’ perspective, and when it is different, the new generation merely hooks on to new currents that are already flowing. Since a change is never abrupt, it must happen within the group of people already existing, and that again means that it must also happen within the same individuals.

This is logical in the abstract, but it’s also empirically observable and then it seems quite astonishing. One person says something you know he wouldn’t have said a few years earlier, and it is always consistent with talk that is heard elsewhere during that time. That is a concrete instant of the times changing right before our eyes.

There’s nothing wrong about changing one’s opinions and attitudes, but it is suspicious when it happens simultaneously to many people. How can we be expected to believe that we are witnessing independent and critical thinking even though they assure us that they have come up with everything all by themselves?

We now like what we didn’t like before. Isn’t our taste genuine either? Isn’t our personality tied to our permanent sentiments? What happens to our own being if we always bow to the wind of change?

Be yourself! This wonderful mantra is chanted in our ears and we love to hear it, believe in it and embrace it as our gospel. It is flattering to think that what is in demand is exactly what we more than anything have to offer: our unique and beloved self.

What a pity it’s neither wanted nor offered, but like any other commercial scheme the make-believe is what matters. If we truly desired to be ourselves, we would shun most things that are presented to us for quick consumption and only after the most careful scrutiny would we accept what we are fed and absorb it into our soul. After all it is not possible to devour all the impressions we are bombarded with and think they will not affect us profoundly. In the process we become different people than we otherwise would have been, and if there was really a genuine self somewhere inside, it can’t be there anymore.

If we were really striving to be ourselves, we would resist the marketing attacks, and if society and the trendsetters were being honest about their advice, they wouldn’t constantly try to transform us, but that would of course be detrimental to their enterprise.

But relax, there is no conspiracy. If there were, we would all be a part of it conspiring to undermine ourselves. It is just that these elementary forces are inherently working against each other. Our basic wish to be respected and to shine among our fellow humans implies a contradiction. On the one hand, we must be unique to be noticed, but on the other we must play the same game to gain recognition. The result is a rather self-destructive compromise: We strive to be better than the others at being like the others. “Be yourself” means “make yourself uniquely like them”.

There may be a natural law. It may be found in the logic of the universe and be derived from how everything seems to fit together in a common purpose. There may even be religious laws given by God or Allah and transferred to humans by means of sacred revelation. These theories may be true, but that doesn’t help us much when striving to formulate the laws of an actual society.

The laws of nature are not inscribed directly anywhere in nature. We have to observe and draw conclusions and interpretations are bound to differ between people and societies. Religious laws are based on beliefs, which certainly differ. Whether or not we imagine social laws to be based on a higher form of laws, it makes no difference when honest human lawgivers sit down to formulate the laws: They just have to look for the best laws for their society.

If there are natural laws, any disobedience to these laws is a crime. But if we don’t know the laws, we also don’t know what would constitute a crime. Still, people seem to enjoy throwing out their verdict on other people’s behavior. “That’s a crime!” is a commonly heard phrase though the speakers are not lawyers and there’s no reason to suspect that they have an intimate knowledge of the laws of their country. We must assume then that some natural law is referred to, since there exist no formal qualifications for insight into that kind of law.

But some sort of authority is still required for this statement. Do they consider themselves to be philosophers or do they possess a special access to a revealed religious law? If so, we would expect them to go on to explain their sources, but that’s usually not going to happen.

What was meant was probably that they considered the action to be wrong or unethical, but why didn’t they just say so instead of calling it a crime?

It sounds good to invoke an authority when things can’t be explained.