Philosophy without the Stupid Words
Because philosophy is 99% stupid words.
As we’ve learned, calling something new doesn’t make it new. Philosophy is no different. The suit of formal education as we now know it is the pursuit of ‘novel research.’ If it’s not novel, you can’t win a Nobel Prize, after all.
Yet most people forget that Einstein worked in a patent office, no doubt taking detailed notes from the patents he was proofing.
Philosophy begins and ends in wonder. - Whitehead
To understand philosophy, you must understand where Plato and Socrates and Aristotle got their ideas from. They got their ideas from the Pre-Socratics, no doubt themselves influenced by the Arab and African worlds which predated them.
To understand philosophy, the two Pre-Socratics you must understand are Heraclitus and Democritus. Both philosophers wanted to break down the universe into it’s smallest part.
Democritus believed that the atom - whatever that meant - was the most fundamental construct in the universe.
Heraclitus, on the other hand, believe that change was the most fundamental construct in the universe.
Heraclitus wasn’t sure about what he couldn’t be sure about, and that’s what made him right. Heraclitus didn’t artificially constrain reality into something he could manipulate; he constrained reality by observing the force that was manipulating reality itself; the arrow of change in the realm of space and time. Change is the only thing we’re really certain of.
In practice, many people seek to understand the parts of a system. Other people seek to understand the phase the system is in to understand where the system might be headed based on historical patterns. Others focus on the relationships between the parts in a system. These approaches reflect a philosophy, whether that philosophy is recognized by the actor or not.
Leibniz updated Democritus by positing the monad, the primal substance, the thing in itself. Hindus have a saying, Tat Tvam Asi, as in I Am That. Alchemists sought to reveal the power of change through chemistry. All science either worships constructs or worships how those constructs change over time.
The danger comes when we start believing that reality reflects the way we’ve named phenomena. Confusing the naming of a phenomena with the understanding of said phenomena is known as the Nominal Fallacy, and its the primary fallacy. Just because you name something doesn’t mean you know what it is, and philosophers have a great habit of creating epistemologies based on arbitrary threads and imaginary sewing machines.
Given that humans don’t live up to their morals, we should accept they don’t live up to their philosophies. And since a system cannot know that which is meta to itself, there’s no way to know if a philosophy is usable or useful…until, perhaps, that is, until it’s too late.