WHY PHILOSOPHY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT IS DEAD: A CONVERSATION WITH A FRIEND
–“Q: What’s the point of [any] f*cking book [of philosophy] if you don’t say any of the contextual details of the situation”–
Ergo why philosophy died with darwin. The analytic philosophy movement was the last gasp of trying to ‘science’ philosophy. The sciences then defeated philosophy. But they have failed to coalesce into a substitute for philosophy or theology or mythology for that matter. So there is a decoherence between the spectrum of grammars of existence: embodiment, anthropomorphism, spirituality, mythology, philosophy, empiricism, science, and operationalism (I do operationalism in this attempt at unification). Yet we need the entire spectrum of subjective to objective to address the spectrum of human experience, such that we can produce mindfulness as both child and aged, female and male, simple and wise, with the same consistent logic under increasing scales of precision demanding increasing knowledge that humans can only slowly accumulate with the wetware we call a brain.
Your fundamental insight, or at least suggestion of insight when you say: “what’s the point of [any] f*cking book if you don’t say any of the contextual details of the situation” is in the failure of drawing the relationship between the very simple laws of the universe (operationalism), their expression in a given context (point in space time conditions and human experience) creating commensurability, and the grammar of precision necessary to provide understanding to the populatoin needed help in adapting to (understanding), changing behavior (acting), and organizing (scaling) in response to the causal density (problem) of the moment.
Sounds like math, sort of, because it is math effectively: an equation. The universe cannot calculate because it cannot predict, but it can compute by trial and error and record it’s findings in physical, biological, neurological, and the metaphysical presumptions, group strategies, traditions, norms, values, habits, rituals and institutions that store that complexity as a scale version of our minds, just as our minds are a scale version of our cells-and-genes, our genes a scale version of elements, and elements a scale version of particles, and particles a scale version of the vacillations of the quantum background.
Science (truth) should terminate with operationalism just as Embodiment (experience) should terminate with neuroscience. But that only tells us what exists and how the universe behaves. It does NOT advise us what to do with that ‘kit’ of understanding. Parables tell us what is universal, history what is particular, science what is precise, and the purpose of philosophy remains in the production of a theory of the production of the good in a given context produced by a given era, and the state of man in the conditions of that era.
There is nothing preventing us from the european ambition to ascend into gods – other than failing to understand our mission is the knowledge necessary for godhood.
Affections
CD