Friday, February 1, 2013
Illogical Philosophy
Something that struck me while ready chapter 10 was the affinity Arendt described between philosophers and death, which they believed would "liberate the mind from bodily pain and pleasure, both of which prevent our mental organs from pursuing their activity" (81). The illogical part is the assumption on the part of the "professional thinkers" is that they do not seem to have thought about the fact that no one knows what succeeds death. Their blind hope seems to be that they will be free of bodily concerns, yet still free to think abstractly about such things as they please. To leave something like that unaddressed seems out of character for people who like to ask questions. Perhaps there is a bodily form in the afterlife. Perhaps there is no afterlife. Perhaps thought is restricted in the afterlife. It is impossible to say, but it is very odd for philosophers to pin their hopes on something they can't know about until they die.
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I have always wondered about the irony of that, but like we talked about in class, I think philosophers have always taken that upon themselves assuming that other people wonder, but don't have time to figure it out. However, philosophers are people too and they want to discover the questions for themselves. Instead of finding the answers, they find more questions and try to tackle those as well. Alas we have volumes and volumes of theories about the world and what the afterlife is. I like Pascal's we talked about in class and I think it sums up the issue of wanting to know something we could never:
ReplyDelete1."God is, or He is not"
2.A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.
3.According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.
4.You must wager. (It's not optional.)
5.Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
6.Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.
(http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/wager.html)