Why Philosophy Matters - History

 

I hope I don’t lose too many with that heading. I promise not to list a bunch of dates and Greek names.

Philosophy is part of science. I’ll get to more on that soon. Long before the word “science” was coined, there were the “Natural Philosophers” in ancient Greece. That’s a good place to start for this blog series which is about the line between and the gray areas around philosophy and science.

Natural Philosophers

Those ancient Greeks were philosophizing about what things are. They didn’t know about quantum physics or laws of motion and likewise, much of what they concluded was wrong. We can give them a pass because they were doing something new. They are set apart from earlier attempts to answer the question “why” because they didn’t resort to wild claims about supernatural forces or beings that lived up on inaccessible mountains.

Shamans

For thousands of years before them, there were the Shamans. Sorry, I said Greece was the place to start, but I need to discuss what that “starting place” grew out of. “Shaman” is just one title of this group that I’ll refer to later. They, like the Natural Philosophers, also used methods of experimentation and gathering of data but I’m distinguishing them because they would also claim cosmic origins of their knowledge or include supernatural explanations of their methods. I’m not trying to lessen their importance. Without them most of us might not be here. As tribes of humans migrated around the globe, to new climates and new ecosystems, they needed to learn. And they did, quickly. If they hadn’t, they would have had a lot of trouble surviving. So, we are the descendants of those who were successful. That’s just basic Darwinian logic, but amazing, nonetheless.

They would find the healing herbs and learn to read the movement of the winds and the waters. The reasons the Shamans spoke of sprites and mystical explanations varied. It might have been for job security, to make it look mysterious so others would think it required special powers to learn. In other cases, it might have been a way to help others remember their lessons, or a way to pass them on. A story or a dance is easier to remember than a formula. The older the archaeology, the less we know about their thinking. Brú na Bóinne - Archaeological Ensemble of the Bend of the Boyne - UNESCO World Heritage Centre

If you go back in history further, something motivated us to come together in groups of a few hundred, and to split off into smaller groups when they grew larger than that. The size was conducive to some of them leaving for days at a time to hunt, or to having some who could protect the young and protect the mothers while they were vulnerable, and to help those who were sick or hurt. Maybe as a lucky accident, or maybe by design, it allowed for exploration and for figuring out how to make an arrowhead, how to corral a mastodon, or just to stare up at the stars because they might tell them something. Keeping the groups smaller allowed for social control of liars, thieves, and freeloaders.

There are still Shamans on the Earth today Home - Flowering Mountain. Some literally call themselves that. I don’t have a list of skills or abilities that qualify one for the job. A modern version of a Shaman could be someone who passes on oral traditions, or someone who forages for food or material to create tools or works of art. It could include musicians or healers of any type.

The Grateful Dead

A friend of mine followed a band called The Grateful Dead one summer while I was in college The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book by Tom Wolfe (thriftbooks.com). When she told her story, she said, “Gerry Garcia is God.” Through experiences like hers we recreate ancient discoveries. With enough people, and the right music, and your own ability to let ourselves go with that flow, we can feel like it’s not us that is doing the dancing, but something else, something larger than just ourselves.

Some of my friends thought that was a little weird, calling a guitarist a god. We have methods now to figure out if such claims are true. I’m sure my friend wasn’t the first to propose Gerry’s divinity, nor were my other friends the first to be skeptical. In similar ways, young people discover the wonders of nature through curiosity and experimenting. It can be a fine line between encouraging that creativity and suppressing it in the name of safety.

A good teacher today not only shows children how to pass a science test but encourages them to discover science on their own. Kids also recreate some of the not-so-scientific phases of our past, like “might makes right”.  It would be good for children to develop the skills of sorting out reality before they start making decisions about how to spend their summers. But I’m getting ahead of the discussion here.

The Axial Age

Moving on, a big leap in the transition from those ancient days in Greece, and everywhere else, into the modern era, took place in the last millennium BCE. Major philosophies and theisms coalesced, blossomed, and were codified into the scriptures and words and common sense that still survives in the modern world. We, the whole planet, are still discussing exactly how “common” common sense is and what we should keep or throw away, but I’ll get to that later. I bring it up because this period is significant enough to be named. It was The Axial Age, and we can trace worldviews and current colloquial sayings back to it.

Civilizations had grown and fallen before that, and we should be careful, and not discount them. A simple distinction, my opinion, between the ones before this time and now, would be that the earlier civilizations emphasized “might makes right” over reflection on what “is” right. The familiar names from the Axial Age include Confucius, Zoroaster, and Siddhartha Gautama aka the Buddha (293) Documentary - The Buddha - PBS Documentary (Narrated by Richard Gere) - YouTube. Judaism has much deeper roots, but the Torah that has been handed down to us came together after they were released from captivity by the Babylonians.

The Golden Rules

Common ideas, like how to put boundaries on the right of self-defense, variations on the Golden Rule, how to maintain larger populations and divide work, came from all these traditions. The phrasing varies, but the ideas are the same.

Many words have been spilled over the Axial Age. There is no need for me to regurgitate them here.

It is important to note that questions about the nature of faith and arguments about what gods are did not develop until hundreds of years later. This was still a time of cultures being enmeshed with their spiritual histories and governments making war because of beliefs. The philosophy behind these questions became necessary when faith, politics, work, family, and other parts of life were separated into the silos that most of us are familiar with now.

Order

To complete our journey from the past to recent events, I’ll quickly cover three types of societal order, Nomological, Normative, and Narrative. See an excerpt from: John Vervaeke Episode 19: Augustine and Aquinas.

Nomological order can be traced back to the Shamans, up to the foundational assumptions of science. It says there are laws that just are. The methods of science allow for those laws to be questioned.

Normative order has codes to designate what is good, or what is permissible, or not. They may or may not be logical. Moral codes are based on some natural laws, something demonstrable. Purity codes might claim some logic, but they are based on tradition. See an excerpt from: Vervaeke Episode 14 Cynics.

A Narrative order is a story that presents a point of view. It’s a path to be followed with a promise of some future end. The Catholic story is a good example. Luther came along and said their narrative is wrong, that salvation is arbitrary.

Now

That brings up to the 16^th century. Soon after Martin Luther made his mark on history, Galileo made his bold claims about the planets. Then came Newton. His formulas got us to the moon. The place where science is trying to figure out what is going on with gravity and quantum mechanics, and non-scientists are trying to figure out what that means to them is where this blog series heads next. If you’re still with me, thank you.

Why Philosophy Matters - Transcendence

 Where to Start? That is not meant to be a philosophical question. When searching for roots, tracing down from the plant, you must ask how from the main root do I want to go? Roots eventually become tiny fibers that are indiscernible from the earth itself. Rather than starting at a place or time, I will begin with “Transcendence”.

In a discussion on a religious podcast in 2023, an agnostic mentioned a transcendent experience they once had. The religious host asked him, “transcended from what, or into what, and you said you were grateful for it, grateful to whom?” The agnostic, Bart Campolo Humanize Me – Home of the Humanize Me podcast, hosted by Bart Campolo, had also stated he never has intentions to convince someone that his experience is better than anyone else’s. Transcendent experiences are a human occurrence. They can happen at any gathering. Music can help them come about, and maybe dancing. Practices to help create them include refraining from eating or sleeping. A quicker path can be found by taking drugs.

Bart defined transcendence as an experience where you are overwhelmed by the presence of some “invisible other”. They discuss what or who that other is, but Bart doesn’t need to. He is defining the experience as something anyone from any culture could experience. An examination of history and literature backs that up. Unfortunately, something that unites all of humanity has often been used to divide us. Tribes, and now nations give names to the “other”. The transcendent experience gets converted into dogma, liturgy, rituals, and codes to live by. The ineffable experience gets turned into a belief.

Studies that have talked with people who have had these experiences find a person might have beliefs about how or why such supernatural events occur, or they might not. They might want to believe things that others tell them they should believe, or they might not. They may have been surrounded by believers, or not. It is understandable that someone who had an overwhelming experience would want to have explanations. The experience itself might have included images or sounds from a tradition or history, or a family member. It may not seem like a belief to the person who experienced it, it may seem like logical conclusions made from the evidence seen, heard, or felt.

The attachment of whatever was felt to something tangible doesn’t have to be supernatural. If music inspires, then the attachment could be the musician, or to the one who wrote the lyrics, or something more generic like the type of music. It could be the ones attending the event too, something that might be closer to the truth, that the feeling of being with people who care about you and are doing the same things is really the source of the feeling of an “other”. Not an other that isn’t there, but something that is greater than the sum of all the parts.

https://youtu.be/d0A_hA5OQSs

In answer to the questions posed by Eric Huffman, the religious person in the podcast, it is an experience that has a feeling of going from one place to another, although it doesn’t require physically going anywhere. The “from” is the experience of day to day living, the regular routine, whatever it is that has become or has been learned to be “normal”. The “into” can be a combination of things. It might be insights into ways of living that will increase happiness. It might be a feeling of connections, to a person or place, or the whole universe. It might include a vision. Words, voices, or stories might come into your head.

The “grateful to whom” part gets complicated. It has been a philosophical question for most of human history and might remain one. When something so profound happens, it’s natural to want to give thanks for it. It’s not illogical to think that a sudden flush of knowledge and insight must have a source, something other than our own brains. But transcendence doesn’t come with evidence that can be shown, or demonstrated, or even easily replicated.

For Bart, there is no “who” that caused this. Something happened in the first generation of stars in the universe, cooking the few elements available into more, exploding, and spreading them around to the galaxies and solar systems that we see today. At this point in the podcast, Justin Bryerly jumped in and asked something about why matter went to all that trouble? It’s hard for me to grasp exactly where a question like that comes from.

The narrative of human origins from the Big Bang to now is 13.7 billion years long. If you prefer a narrative that is only a few pages, I can see how it would be hard to think of these as in the same category. But in a very real sense, they are. Grasping that, I believe, is essential to our survival. In the rest of the series, I hope to find ways to demonstrate that and consider how all of us can accept the variations in the interpretations of transcendence and find the commonalities. 

This entry might need some polish, but I wanted to get out there before moving on.

Why Philosophy Matters - Introduction

 Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it. Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science. People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big question. I’m not out to win the debate.

Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.

Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly, that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the state I live in finally caught up to me.

When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.

What I Want You to Know

 I'm gonna make a change

For once in my life
It's gonna feel real good
Gonna make a difference
Gonna make it right
As I turn up the collar on my favorite winter coat
This wind is blowin' my mind
I see the kids in the street, with not enough to eat
Who am I to be blind, pretending not to see their needs
A summer's disregard, a broken bottle top
And one man's soul
They follow each other on the wind, ya know
'Cause they got nowhere to go
That's why I want you to know

[Chorus]
I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
Na-na-na na-na-na nana-nana

[Verse 2]
I've been a victim of a selfish kinda love
It's time that I realize
There are some with no home
Not a nickel to loan
Could it be really me pretending that they're not alone?
A willow deeply scarred, somebody's broken heart
And a washed-out dream
They follow the pattern of the wind, ya see
'Cause they got no place to be
That's why I'm starting with me

[Chorus]
I'm starting with the man in the mirror (Who?)
I'm asking him to change his ways (Who?)
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
I'm starting with the man in the mirror (Who?)
I'm asking him to change his ways (Who?)
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that change
I'm starting with the man in the mirror (Man in the mirror, oh yeah)
I'm asking him to change his ways (Change his ways)
(Come on, change)
And no message could have been any clearer

[Bridge]
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make the change
You gotta get it right, while you got the time
'Cause when you close your heart (You can't)
Then you close your mind (Close your, your mind!)

[Chorus]
(That man, that man) I'm starting with the man in the mirror
(That man)
(Ooh!)
(That man, that man) I'm asking him to change his ways
(That man, the man)
(Change his ways, ooh!)
And no message could have been any clearer
If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make that
(Take a look at yourself and then make that)
Change!