Discovering philosophy / Thomas I. White. --Brief ed.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0135080037/
[2] - Trying to Explain Reality
A) Putting Yourself in the Right Frame of Mind
B) Explaining Your New World
- An Anthropomorphic Explanation
- A Natural Explanation
C) Before Philosophy, Mythic Explanations
- "Reality" in Myth
- Modern Mythic, or Anthropomorphic, Explanations
D) Reality Versus Appearance
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[2] - TRYING TO EXPLAIN REALITY
A) Putting Yourself in the Right Frame of Mind
One good way to approach the concept of reality is to look at how the
first people who wondered about it tried to explain it. To understand
what these thinkers say, however, you should be in the same frame of
mind they were in. So be patient and try to imagine the following
scenario; it's all for a good purpose.
You are on a tropical cruise and you're having a terrific time. The
people are friendly and the weather is great. On the last night of the
cruise, however, you have too good a time and drink too much champagne
at the captain's farewell party. You decide to take a walk around the
deck to clear your head. As you stagger along, the ship unexpectedly
runs into heavy winds and rough seas. The ship lurches, and you fly
across the deck. As you try to get up, a huge wave crashes over the
ship. The ship pitches again, and you are washed overboard.
Unfortunately, no one realizes you're gone until the ship returns to
port. Your disappearance is a mystery.
The good news is that when you were thrown overboard, you grabbe hold
of a log in the water, and the winds and currents carried you to a
small island nearby. You are safe. The bad news is that you don't have
the faintest idea where you are. In fact, your head hit a stanchion
before you went overboard, and you have a ferocious headache and
complete amnesia. You do not know who you are, where you came from, or
anything about your past. Worse than that, you remember almost nothing
of what you learned through your years of schooling. You know you need
food and water, but beyond that, your mind is blank. It works, but it's
empty. Really empty!
So here you are, a sentient, intelligent creature surrounded by a
complex world. Light turns into darkness as a disc in the sky that is
too bright to look at moves across the sky and sinks into the waves.
When this happens, the sky sometimes changes into different colors.
Then countless smaller lights appear that move very slowly. After what
seems like a set period, the darkness goes away and the bright circle
returns-but from the other side of the island. The sky is usually blue,
the breeze warm and comfortable. But sometimes for no reason dark gray
objects cover the blue, and drops of water, loud noises, hard winds,
and lines of light come from the sky. Then the blue returns. Food grows
on the trees, and even replaces itself. You also see other living
beings, but they are different from you. Some live in the water, others
fly through the air. What does it all mean?
If you can imagine this situation, you can imagine your confusion and
fear. You are in an exceedingly complicated place. And because you have
a human mind, you also wonder about everything that is happening. Your
fear is mixed with curiosity.
B) Explaining Your New World
Having come this far, now try to imagine how you would understand this
world you know nothing about. First, you would probably attempt to find
some order in what you see. You would distinguish between the things
around you that move (animals, birds) and those that stay put (plants,
rocks). You would distinguish patterns-light (day) followed by dark
(night). You would also see that much about what happens is
unpredictable-the weather, for instance. Eventually you would develop
some sense of what your world consists of.
But describing things would not be enough for you. You would want to
understand what goes on, and why. How would you do that? How would you
explain, for example, the fruit on the trees, the passing storms in the
sky, and the coming and going of the bright disk? Think about that for
a minute.
- An Anthropomorphic Explanation
[anthropomorphic] An anthropomorphic account of something explains it
in human terms. For example, an anthropomorphic interpretation of
reality explains things in terms of who is responsible for them, not
simply what happened. Such an account regularly appeals to the notion
of divine beings.
Chances are your first explanation would be neither philosophical nor
scientific. The human animal is by nature very nervous, and you would
probably feel fear and awe at the great powers you witness in action
around you. Feeling pressed to calm yourself and to make some sense of
what you see, you Would start interpreting your world in the only terms
you know-your own human ones. You would probably believe that other
living beings cause what happens. You would personify things, imagining
that everything you see is alive like you, with a will and a
personality of its own. You would come to think that the winds blow,
the clouds move, and the plants grow because they want to. You might
even conclude that these natural occurrences express the will of one or
more superior, incomprehensible being whose actions may be benign, or
hostile, or completely arbitrary and indifferent.
Whichever explanation you come up with, your account of reality could
be called anthropomorphic-that is, your account would be given in human
form. ("Anthropomorphic" comes from two Greek words: anthropos,
"human," and morphe, "form.") Such an interpretation of reality
explains things in terms of who is responsible for them, not simply
what happened. And to the extent that your explanations consist of
stories about divine beings, this kind of thinking is also called
mythic. (Mythos is the Greek word for "story.") The anthropomorphic,
mythic mode of explaining reality obviously leads more in the direction
of religion than science, and this was essentially the direction taken
by the earliest human societies.
Notice what all this means for your understanding reality on your
island. I come to you and say, "Tell me, what exists, what is real?"
Your answer would not be that of twentieth-century Westerners-"what is
real is what I perceive with my senses." It would probably be more
like, "First, there is what I can see-the trees, the water, the
animals, and the sky. Then there is what I cannot see-the powers that
bring the storms and make the light come and go." Your conception of
reality would include material and nonmaterial things, you may very
well project human characteristics onto either, and you might even
imagine some of them as the equivalent of gods.
- A Natural Explanation
You'd probably start with an anthropomorphic, mythic account of
reality. But eventually some questions occur to you. You attempt to
test the wind, the sea, and the trees on your island, you try some
"experiments" to see if particular actions anger or please the gods
that rule them. Eventually, you conclude that what you do doesn't
affect things, that you cannot communicate with them, or at least that
they do not respond. Perhaps you decide these gods do not exist. Now
your thinking might go in a different direction. You might consider the
possibility that you and the events around you are all part of the same
system of natural, impersonal forces. You hypothesize that everything
that happens has a cause, and that these causes somehow lie within the
events themselves. Exactly how isn't immediately apparent, but, you
think, if you looked long and hard enough, you could figure it out. You
assume that the nature of the world around you can be grasped by your
mind. In essence, you opt to explain your world in terms of some
concept of nature. When you take this path, you are following the steps
of the first philosophers.
C) Before Philosophy, Mythic Explanations
The earliest human beings found themselves barraged by experiences they
did not know the meaning of, much as you were on the island. Some of
what happened was wonderful; some was terrifying. Along with their fear
and confusion, however, these people also had a basic impulse to try to
make sense of the world around them. We are curious creatures, and we
naturally want to understand what is happening around us. That's why
we're called Homo sapiens-"thinking man."
The first explanations we came up with about the world were
anthropomorphic and mythic, just like yours on the island. For about
2000 years before the Greeks tried their hands at explaining the world,
a number of major cultures in Egypt and Mesopotamia had invented their
own elaborate, but decidedly unphilosophical, explanations of reality.
These ancient cultures wove their myths into highly organized
religions. Every event was the product of actions taken by a variety of
gods and goddesses.
The ancient Egyptians personified and deified the world of nature
itself. The sun is one expression of Ra, king of the gods; the air is
the god Shu; the sky is the goddess Nut. The Nile is not a river that
ebbs and flows according to natural forces, but a being in its own
right that causes its own actions. Every year about the time the river
rose to flood crest, the pharaoh, who was also a god, offered it gifts
of thanks.
We find a similar phenomenon in Mesopotamia. The sky is Anu, the chief
god, and the storm is Enlil, another divinity. Items we think of as
ordinary and lifeless are even thought to have personalities and wills
of their own. Salt, for example, although not a god, is personified as
an agent that might help a victim of witchcraft. There was even a
proper way to ask its help:
"O Salt, created in a dean place, For food of gods did Enlil destine
thee. Without thee no meal is set out in Ekur, Without thee god, king,
lord, and prince do not smell incense. I am [fill in the blank], the
son of [fill in the blank], Held captive by enchantment, Held in fever
by bewitchment. O Salt, break my enchantmentl Loose my spelll Take from
me the
bewitchment] And as my Creator I shall extol thee.
- "Reality" in Myth
The first human attempts to explain the world see reality as having
both tangible and intangible forms. Trees, rivers, houses, and palaces
exist. But so do divinities. In fact, the invisible reality of
.immaterial gods and goddesses is superior to the visible reality of
the material world. Crops grow in the field and are harvested. Men and
women are born, and they die. But the gods are immortal.
The deities are also in charge. Humans are inferior creatures subject
to their will-or whim. Not even the world of nature moves by its own
power. Everything is under the sway of the gods. The Mesopotamian god
of the earth, Enki, controls whether crops grow, pastures flourish, and
orchards bear fruit. The world of nature is simply an expression of the
desires of gods and goddesses.
- Modern Mythic, or Anthropomorphic, Explanations
Mythic explanations of the world characterize all ancient,
prephilosophical civilizations. But that does not mean that myth
disappears with the advent of philosophy. Indeed, mythic and
anthropomorphic accounts of reality are a consistent part of human
history, persisting to the present day. Most contemporary religions,
like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, offer essentially anthropomorphic
and mythic explanations of reality. In addition to the physical world
of our senses, religions tell of a spiritual dimension which is unseen
and superior to anything material. This is true of Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.*
*It is important to tealize that when we label a certain kind of
thinking as "mythic," we are not saymS that it is "false" or
"imaginary." Mythic thinking is essentially "story-like," so it may
express "truth" in a different way than science or philosophy-more
figuratively than literally.
Once again, notice that this thinking presupposes that reality is both
material and nonmaterial, and that the latter is in every important way
superior to the former. So if you believe that something cannot exist
if it can't be examined with our senses, think again. To billions of
people on this planet, the things we cannot see are more real than the
things we can see.
D) Reality Versus Appearance
Although we will probe the anthropomorphic, mythic understanding of
reality no further, you should by now see that mythic, or religious,
interpretations of existence underscore clearly and dramatically a very
important point about the nature of reality, that is, the distinction
between reality and appearance.
In essence, a mythic, or religious, explanation explicitly holds that
the world is not at all what it seems to be. Things appear one way, but
in reality they are something else entirely. When we look around, it
appears that all that exists are the physical, material objects we can
sense. Myth tells us that in reality other unseen beings and forces not
only exist but also exert powers far greater than anything we can
experience with our senses-or, perhaps, even imagine. To us it appears
that the natural world operates according to inherent and predictable
cycles. Mythic, or anthropomorphic, thinking tells us that in reality
these events are controlled by invisible powers.
The question of whether things are as they seem to be lies at the heart
of every discussion about the nature of reality. We may start with the
world we observe with our senses. But in one way or another, accounts
of the nature of existence usually claim that behind the appearance is
a different reality. Myth and religion make this claim. And so do
philosophy and science-only in a different way.
Discovering philosophy / Thomas I. White. --Brief ed.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0135080037/
liezard wrote:
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>>>>>>>>> the question " what is philososophy?"?
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>>>>>>>>> what means the answer to the question "what is the nature of the
>>>>>>>>> question: what is philosophy?"??
