On Philosophy…
Yes, let’s touch upon the most intricate subject, which will explain why I also keep my distance from it.
Bring me a philosophical system such that its internal consistency overwhelms me, and I can exclaim, “Yes, this is it! Truth stands right before me. I’ve found it, and now I can cast everything aside and vanish within this truth.” That’s my criterion.
Perhaps you might say, “You haven’t encountered it, or you did, but you didn’t understand.” My friend, I assure you that from ancient Greece to Kant, including the philosophy of science, there is no one I haven’t read or studied. These eyes have devoted thousands of hours to this pursuit. But it didn’t happen, it’s not happening.
Now, it’s possible to fill this space with a multitude of concepts. I haven’t encountered one that could escape metaphysics. I include science in this. The person says, “Truth is reached through science.” And I ask: What is your instrument? Mathematics. And what is mathematics?
I spent years with mathematics, at an advanced level, and I enjoyed it immensely. But while you can’t say a single word about the nature of the instrument you use as science, which is mathematics, how is what you present as “truth” different from metaphysics? Do you have an explanation? For instance, faced with Kant’s claim in Critique of Pure Reason regarding mathematics – “Mathematical judgments are synthetic a priori” – you either remain helpless or you engage in metaphysics again. Is there an escape from metaphysics? According to Kant again, while the world we experience (the world of phenomena) is a world of appearances shaped by the a priori forms of our minds (time, space, and the categories of understanding), aren’t “things-in-themselves” (the world of noumena) realities that we cannot directly know, lying beyond our experience? So, we impose time and space on the universe! While according to Newton, time and space are objective and universal entities, independent “stages” in which events take place, didn’t Kant shake philosophy by arguing that this “stage” is actually a product of our minds? Does this sound familiar? Quantum physics!
Doesn’t every claim about the world, the universe, its workings, or truth, whether scientific or philosophical, ultimately take shape through one’s own beliefs, affiliations, past, investments, personality, fears, desires, expectation of acceptance, or fear of criticism, or ambition? So, are those who engage with these matters, seeking and/or imposing this “truth” on their surroundings, here as a separate, extraterrestrial species? Let this be Nietzsche’s critique.
So, isn’t the very being called human, who asks all these questions and seeks answers, involved in this process? If humans are not involved, what is the meaning of truth? What can something unrelated to humans tell the one who seeks it?
If humans are involved, don’t they bend and shape truth with the psychological dynamics I listed earlier? Let this also be Nietzsche’s critique.
Whether you are a scientist or a philosopher, what difference does it make? If you are not a separate species, if you didn’t come from space, if you didn’t descend from the sky, even if you are an all-knowing scholar of knowledge, science, and philosophy, you cannot separate and detach yourself from the claim you put forth about truth (Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Quantum physics). Can you detach yourself? Maybe if you lose your mind? Can you reach that point?
So, are all these well-intentioned or ambition-driven endeavors of people worthless? Of course, they are valuable, but on the condition that they are not dogmatically imposed. Because power dynamics are within everything. As someone who has engaged with this enough, I can say this comfortably. Let this come from Nietzsche as well.
It is to avoid this contradiction that I place philosophy and science in a secondary position when it comes to cosmological and human explanations. Isn’t this writing also a kind of philosophy? I don’t know. Maybe. If so, let it be the first and last, so that we don’t keep falling into contradictions. But I might do it for pleasure. Look, even here there’s a motivation!
Forget the claim of truth, brother, if you say I do these things for pleasure, then hats off to you! If we are not doing it for pleasure, if we are seeking truth, then let’s start from the point of how little we still know, ok?