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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Editor's 1-Minute Essay:
Philosophy
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The following represents a distillation of Dr. Adler's Syntopicon Essay plus my own thoughts:
- Philosophy literally means "the love of wisdom."
Further, the great idea of Philosophy refers to basic knowledge about the nature of things; a means and guide to a good life.
Philosophy represents an ideal, a journey, a quest - rather than a claim to "having arrived," an accumulation of a large corpus of information.
One bearing the credentials, for example, of a mathematician, will, we presume, be a walking storehouse of hard-data on that subject; but one holding him or herself out to be a philosopher need only be in pursuit of wisdom. In this spirit, Socrates tell us that the philosopher will love wisdom but not necessarily possess it.
Socrates, too -- in what may be his most famous statement -- asserts that the unexamined life is not worth living. This sentiment also expresses the essence of philosophy, its primary theme of questioning all things.
Dr. Adler is famous for his statement, "Philosophy is everybody's business." Humans, by nature, are rational creatures with vast potentialites; as such, a quest for understanding about the nature of life is a journey that everyone ought to embark upon.
"To be a human being is to be endowed with the proclivity to philosophize. To some degree we all engage in philosophical thought in the course of our daily lives. Acknowledging this is not enough. It is also necessary to understand why this is so and what philosophy's business is. The answer, in a word, is IDEAS. In two words, it is GREAT IDEAS -- the IDEAS basic and indispensable to understanding ourselves, our society, and the world in which we live."
Even so, some will claim, we must emphasize science -- practical things -- in order to ensure progress.
Dr. Adler:
"The glorification and adulation of science give the word 'scientific' its eulogistic connotation... philosophy differs remarkably from science in its mode of inquiry and in its noninvestigative method of thought. It has its own virtues, and they are different from the virtues of science... To say that philosophy is inferior to science in regard to progress is like saying that a fish is inferior to a bird in locomotion...
"... science does not and cannot tell us what ends we ought to pursue; it does not and cannot tell us what our purposes ought to be. However useful it is productively, it does not tell us whether we ought or ought not to produce certain things (such as thermonuclear bombs or supersonic transport planes)... It does not tell us, in short, what we ought or ought not to do and what we ought or ought not to seek...
"Without the prescriptive knowledge given us by ... philosophy, we have no guidance in the use of that power [of science], directing it to the ends of a good life and a good society. The more power science and technology confer upon us, the more dangerous and malevolent that power may become unless its use is checked and guided by moral obligations stemming from our philosophical knowledge of how we ought to conduct our lives and our society."
The greater our scientific advances, the more we need Lady Philosophy to guide us. Her wisdom will not teach men how to clone human beings, but she will discuss with us whether we ought to do so.
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