RE: How worthless is Philosophy?
February 27, 2024 at 12:04 am
(This post was last modified: February 27, 2024 at 12:09 am by The Grand Nudger.)
A miscommunication. Their rightness and wrongness isn't the reason that I mentioned our mythologizing or their semi-literate status. It's to reground these philosophies in what it appeared to be about, what it appeared to be for, and who would have been familiar with any of it, in their own time.
For example, plato didn't propose that we be reasonable about god stories - quite the opposite. He affirmed those superstitions, especially insomuch as they supported whatever he was saying about good governance and moral virtue - identical to him (at least one of the contributors to laozi took this same approach). He had a contemporary who did speak critically about the myths and who the historical interpretation of mythology is named after but even that guy, euhemerus, wasn't speaking innovatively on the subject. There was an older trend of the same. The greeks had, by that time, already been approaching their god myths with scrutiny for centuries. It was later christians who insisted otherwise, largely as an effort to denigrate the culture and it's beliefs.
Ultimately, he became PLATO because some other then nameless functionary he taught went on to teach a then-unremarkable boy who one day conquered much of their known world. Axial philosophy, in both eastern and western traditions..it seems... was the business of bureaucracy. The politics of power. That we made it something more or other than that, the academic hobby of the wealthy intelligentsia, is what I was referring to about mythologizing the times. Comparing it to trade material is to remind us that what axial philosophers were doing wasn't much different than running a night school for dropouts who want jobs at the licensing bureau. The formal or more formative education of the intellegentsia and elites of that time would have been in warfare. It should come as no surprise, then, that both eastern and western axial philosophy can be summarized as the guiding principles of warrior kings and the people they would rely on, and that this would feature heavily in the respective and then-looming empires of each tradition.
Perhaps, if we brought this stuff out of the ivory tower we've constructed for it as a consequence of history, it would have greater overt purchase in our current society. Look at the success that zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had. I've never read it. I have no thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of the things discussed - but it's the number one selling book on philosophy, of all time, in the us.
For example, plato didn't propose that we be reasonable about god stories - quite the opposite. He affirmed those superstitions, especially insomuch as they supported whatever he was saying about good governance and moral virtue - identical to him (at least one of the contributors to laozi took this same approach). He had a contemporary who did speak critically about the myths and who the historical interpretation of mythology is named after but even that guy, euhemerus, wasn't speaking innovatively on the subject. There was an older trend of the same. The greeks had, by that time, already been approaching their god myths with scrutiny for centuries. It was later christians who insisted otherwise, largely as an effort to denigrate the culture and it's beliefs.
Ultimately, he became PLATO because some other then nameless functionary he taught went on to teach a then-unremarkable boy who one day conquered much of their known world. Axial philosophy, in both eastern and western traditions..it seems... was the business of bureaucracy. The politics of power. That we made it something more or other than that, the academic hobby of the wealthy intelligentsia, is what I was referring to about mythologizing the times. Comparing it to trade material is to remind us that what axial philosophers were doing wasn't much different than running a night school for dropouts who want jobs at the licensing bureau. The formal or more formative education of the intellegentsia and elites of that time would have been in warfare. It should come as no surprise, then, that both eastern and western axial philosophy can be summarized as the guiding principles of warrior kings and the people they would rely on, and that this would feature heavily in the respective and then-looming empires of each tradition.
Perhaps, if we brought this stuff out of the ivory tower we've constructed for it as a consequence of history, it would have greater overt purchase in our current society. Look at the success that zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had. I've never read it. I have no thoughts on the rightness or wrongness of the things discussed - but it's the number one selling book on philosophy, of all time, in the us.
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