[Home]History of Wikipedia commentary/Drawbacks of Philosophical Understandings

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Revision 4 . . November 10, 2001 3:00 pm by ManningBartlett [moved]
Revision 3 . . October 31, 2001 1:25 pm by BM14582
Revision 2 . . October 31, 2001 1:20 pm by BM14582
Revision 1 . . October 30, 2001 6:10 pm by Anders Torlind [Moved here]
  

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The problem with using philosophy as a basis for understanding anything is that any answer(s) you arrive at can't be uniformly applied to reality (that is, the relativity of a situation screws up everything any given philosophy tries to solve or explain), no matter how well it is thought out or the purity of its intent. Reality is, for all intensive purposes, black and white. An action simply is. You can try to determine the motivation behind an event, but for the most part there really isn't one (at least no obvious one). The simplicity of our everyday world starts to turn gray when our eventual understanding of reality inevitably leaves us with more questions than answers. You become consumed with the question of why.

Look at it another way: life, death, war, peace, and generally anything that we like or dislike for our various reasons happens because it does. That's it. You could say that we are here on this planet for a reason, but that isn't necessarily true. We could be here completely by accident with no real purpose except to reproduce. Who knows what purpose, if any, we are here to accomplish. No one was here when we came to be to help us clarify this issue and so we are left to guess. This guess will conform to how we see the world as well as how we would like to see the world. Americans, for example, are seen as evil to some people because of the society we have created, while others revere us for the very same reason. Who is correct? Neither? Both? This is where any attempt to conceptually understand the world around us fails. No one is unbiased enough, or enlightened enough, to arrive at any kind of real and accurate conclusion to the way things are or are supposed to be. Any attempt to see the pattern in the noise would be nothing more than a best guess.

If anything, philosophy should be used to simply demonstrate to you that there is more than one way to look at something. When you start to step back and allow yourself to view the world as a whole you will start to see that there are benefits and drawbacks to every way of doing anything. There is no universal good or evil because good intentions can produce very negative results and serendipity can turn misfortune into a windfall. You just never know. There is no roadmap to success or failure. There are no guarantees either way. But within this understanding you should realize that your possibilities are limited only by your situation or yourself.
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