Thought for Today

Philosophy. Mutter that word, and the eyes of many, if not most, glaze over. What comes to mind? Mind numbing incomprehensible words. Often those words are intended to baffle, even sometimes to confuse, to make one appear super extra smart and brilliant. The longer the words used, the better. It is no wonder that many people’s minds immediately switch off.

The problem is that those philosophies trickle down into everyday life, and although sometimes hidden or morphed in their form, end up driving and directing popular culture. We see that front and center in our culture of lies. Whether on the political Left or Right, lying for the cause is ok, even praiseworthy.

Not only that, but companies lie about their products and people sometimes lie about themselves on social media. Then there is the scourge of identity theft where someone steals another’s identity, an outright total lie, not to mention all the phishing scams, also outright lies. To sum up: if it is perceived as being beneficial: lie.

To over simplify things a bit, for much of history, specifically in the West, both philosophy and theology started on the basis of the existence of God. Over time, their paths diverged, with arguably the most significant philosophical break happening with Descartes, and his famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Instead of existence being based in God, Descartes placed the basis of our lives in our ability to think and reason. As he put it, he sought to doubt everything, and the one thing he could not doubt was his mental act of doubting. Ironically, Descartes himself was a Roman Catholic, and arguably, he wasn’t seeking to undermine the God-based foundations of Western philosophy.

As time went on, philosophical modernism, tracing its roots back to Descartes, held sway. Although absolute truth was held to still exist, one could not actually know what that unifying truth was. In premodern times, absolute unifying truth was a given, as all existence was rooted in the absolute certainty of the biblical God. Philosophical modernism knocked out the certainty of that foundational underpinning. The center of existence had changed. Instead of being rooted in God, it was now rooted in the self.

One could “know,” but could one “truly know”? Could one “know” with absolute certainty? Not really. Having knocked out the underpinning of God, what followed was a quest “to know,” to find an absolute truth, to find the unifying thing. Even the dominant name of premiere educational institutions still reflect that quest: University, the search for something that unifies. The goal was to find that which could unify all things, to find that absolute truth. Even though we philosophically could not know it, searching for it was the overarching quest.

Or so it was, until the rise of postmodernism (that which follows modernism), when it was determined that the quest was futile; there was no absolute, there was no truth. Better to admit it, and to give up the pipe dream of the modernist search.

We will turn to philosophical postmodernism and its consequences in the next post.