DELIVERED
So, the
last 1000 years of western philosophical thought in three minutes. Pay
attention at the back.
Reason is
the starting point.
Prior to
the 13th century and a guy called Thomas Aquinas, a monk of all things, in a
nutshell, God knows everything and we know nothing. The
domination of the Roman Catholic Church on all things, Spanish inquisition etc.
etc.
Then
after Aquinas, a fundamental break in knowledge occurs. A paradigm shift, if u
will: Aquinas said, hold on, we’ve been blessed with minds; maybe we can use
them to understand ourselves and our universe better.
This
eventually leads to the point where Man BECOMES AUTONOMOUS in his thinking. We
can trace this through Descartes, Hegel and Kant (who was a right Kant), each
one trying to find a unified field of knowledge, a set of rules, that explains
everything. Till we get to the existentialists.
Now they
are really important, because they are the ones that first recognized where all
this thinking ends. They hated the speculative philosophy,
they called it, of Hegel and Kant. They thought that this concentrating on
trying to define the "essence" of man was totally wrong, because it
ignored the most important thing: Existence. That’s the first thing we are
aware of. Then, maybe, why we are here. That comes
after. They reverse Descartes, I think therefore I am, and say instead, I am
but I’m not sure I think. We exist, but our essence, who
we are, what we are, why we are is up for debate. It is permanently in
question.
And they
say all this because they feel philosophy, by the 19th century has only shown
that there is an END TO REASON. It doesn't explain everything. Reason takes us
to the edge, but beyond that, there is the unknown, the beyond, the
unexplainable, the void. The abyss. This is the term
they used. And if one stays at the edge, without leaping into the abyss, and
thereby face it and try and cross it, essentially the
only conclusion to draw is that life is essentially meaningless. Nihilism, in other words. Now, the
two grandfathers of existentialism were Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and both, in
identifying this abyss, sought in their own way to cross it, bridge it. But
they came at it from totally different perspectives. One believed in God, and
one felt that we had killed God. So we have Kierkegaard and his "leap of
faith" and an effort to return to God and Nietzsche’s superman, (note how
these two terms are so familiar to u), the Nietzchean
quest for man
to "overcome himself", become who he is, transcend the abyss in
himself, and become the ubermensch. One ended up mad,
the other suffered from chronic depression all his life. It ain't
always what it’s cracked up to be, being a philosopher.
Now, to
bring us totally up-to-date, we come to the post-structuralists,
or what they are usually referred to as the post-modernists. People like Baudriallard, who’s the guy that the Wachowski
Brothers plagiarized in The Matrix, with his idea of the simulacra. The
simulacrum is like the matrix. Explained. And what
they do is simply lock us in the tomb, deeper and deeper into the abyss and
throw away the key, by dismantling the very means of escaping: Truth itself.
How? Through demonstrating that there is no guarantee of meaning in
language anymore. And that’s a bitch because of our obvious dependency
on it. The vicious cycle of legitimization: who says the truth is the truth? U say its one thing, I say its another, but we can’t both be
right. However, who legitimizes the word “truth”, when this same word is the
very thing in question. Round and round we go, then, until essentially we reach
the conclusion that universal truths, meta-narratives in post-modern language,
are no longer possible anymore. There doesn’t appear to be anyway of knowing
anything. Nihilism defined as the belief that life is essentially meaning-less.
Deeper
and deeper into the abyss, then, with reason clearly no longer able to catch
us...
,