The poor philosophy…
It seems that philosophy remains the only way to solve our dilemmas. Unfortunately, it went down a long time ago. After Voltaire, some philosophers that "invent systems about the esoteric embodiment of Universe" are "like those travellers that go in Constantinople and speak about seraglio; they seen it only from outside and say that know what sultan does with his favourites".
From modern philosophers, it is almost unanimously recognised that the top was Kant, thanks to the monumentality of his work. Germany used to have a greater need of him than philosophy. In its impetuous evolution, German people wanted to have what every great nation has and they did not have yet: a great philosopher. How is that that the tribe of philosophers accepted him? We find the answer in the incapability of understanding real philosophical problems by some alleged philosophers, but who prefer to declare themselves as Kant’s disciples, supposing that nobody is patient enough to read all his works. People will think that at least you would read and understand him. Nobody could contradict you. Besides, maybe German government will give you a prize.
As someone observed, "for Kant, the obsession of the hierarchization makes him to put the music on last place, below the gardening, giving as reason the fact that music disturbs the neighbours". What interests me is not to establish a hierarchy, a prizing dais, but the influence of philosophy in real life. Kant did not enter the life of anyone, and, on the threat of the evolution of German philosophy, it went hand in hand with German mentality. I find Nietzsche being on the top, not because he discovered something, but because he indicated a way on which German nation followed, being on its taste. German philosophy, Germans’ mentality and German politics went together toward German apogee, marked by Hitler – the superman invocated with so much pathos by Nietzsche. About Nietzsche, Giovanni Papini says that he was "the most Anglo-Frenchman German philosopher. Even if he had learnt from Frenchmen how to love fine and subtle things and from Englishmen the practical and clear ones, he did not succeeded to make free his mind by the Teutonic nebulosity". Giovanni Papini bantered almost all philosophers and "Teutonic nebulosity" is an expression created in his enthusiasm as pamphleteer. We must recognize Nietzsche was only a doctrinal support for Nazism, as Marx was for communism. "Hitler has the endorsement, even the active support of Martin Heidegger, Richard Strauss, Gottfried Benn, Carl Schmitt, Konrad Lorenz, Heisenberg and other German Nobel prizemen. … A cultivate barbarity that knew to recuperate German cultural tradition in own aims. The deification of German culture makes the "intelligentia" to underestimate Hitler’s importance. One cannot conceive that a man who did not finished primary school to close by Stein, Bismarck…. Nothing but the vainglory of their culture made them not to see in Hitler a threatening" – Pascal Bruckner, "The Melancholy of Democracy".
Criticizing Nietzsche, now I feel needing to rehabilitate him at least a little. Au fond, he was well intentioned. Even his superman was only an attempt to encourage people to get beyond the actual stage and rise a step more. People generally, not a certain person! He underwent like Jesus, who tried to amend the behaviour of Jewish people and not to provoke the birth of a new religion, but, because German people are contented with themselves, entrusted Hitler with the mission to be their superman. The essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy could be found in this paragraph from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "God is a representation (fiction); I want your vision not to go farther than your creative will. … you would shape the Superman". Which were the consequences of his philosophy? A first effect was the immediate and known one, even if Nietzsche himself adverts to the danger in following paragraph: "This one maybe will not among you, my brothers! But you could be some Superman’s ancestors. Let it to be the best faith of yours". As it was expect the Germans thought they could bring the future to the present, becoming in this way their own ancestors. What should be a faith became the will of immediately carrying it out. Nietzsche himself suggested this idea by that "maybe", inadmissible for a philosopher but which denote an inner hidden aspiration. We find out here the same wrong idea: man wants to become his own God. It is a dement answer to another misplaced question: "Who made the world?" with all its derivates: "Who made man?", "How did man came on the Earth?" and many other similar ones. Could we really live without such stupid questions? Stupid, because we will never learn the answers to them and, inventing answers each and all more fantasist, one created equally much life philosophies, along with their religions, as far as that of the Superman in Hitler’s version, communist ones and … I would go on, but it is not the case.
And, because I mentioned Kant, here is a quote rehabilitating him in a certain measure for his sincerity: "Its partisans (of philosophy) lessen, since those gifted enough to make themselves respected in other sciences do not seem to agree to compromise their reputation in a discipline in which anyone, even if he is unknowing in all the other fields, ventures to utter a definitive judgement". Yes, here he is right! In old times, philosophy was all-embracing; now we might ask ourselves: what remained of it? As for people "unknowing in the other fields", let us remind Schopenhauer saying, "A philosopher should study a serious science firstly", of course for proving his intellectual abilities, or Plato, who put on the frontispiece of his Academy the slogan "Who is not a geometrician does not enter here".
I remember myself that, when I started to read more seriously philosophy (I avoid the word "study", as it seems to me to be rather "precious") for my simple curiosity of seeing what the "scholars" deal with, I approached it as any science: I procured myself some basic books and sat down with a pencil in hand. With the pencil, I did not want to do so much. Instead, piles of dictionaries and encyclopaedias agglomerated my desk soon, because I was reading like from a foreign language. I said to myself that, maybe my intellect is not so good. This thought ambitioned me more and I insisted. In time, I did get even a little fervour. Fortunately, my fancy was gone and I realized that the most part of such text are only a parade of words produced by people who have nothing to say. Still, there was a captivating phase as well, when, almost systematically, after the ravishment achieves by an author’s genial glitter, the following one brings off a disillusion, showing the flaws from the predecessor’s theory, followed by a new theory, more attractive, but which will be proved latter to have its weaknesses too, and so on, maybe for adverting us that in the world there is dialectics, not only binary logic, there is penumbra, not only light and dark. Close to our years, things seem to rush themselves like a race in a bobsled, where, because of the speed, the bobsled goes from a wall to the other faster and faster. Then, all small problems disappear and only two chief questions remain: "could we keep the bobsled on the toboggan?" and "how long until we reach the end is?". These questions are in sport. In life we should know the axis face to which we need to keep the equilibrium. As for the end, it is without sense here. Still, there is only a moral: let us not haste toward a catastrophic one and, if possible, to make life as agreeable we can in existing conditions.
The purpose of any philosophy is to find out the means through which man can get the happiness or at least a modus vivendi in which he feels well. For this, a first task is to know the world inside of which he lives and to identify the sources of unhappiness, in order to eliminate them. Along the centuries, he did it in many different ways.
As an integral knowledge of the universe is impossible, man imagined every time a cosmogony according with the ethic of the society of that time, cosmogony that served as base for respective religion, through which people apply in their life the principle of that ethic. From this reason, it is without sense to search for logical explanations beyond the level for which a certain cosmogony was created. So, in Christianity, everything begins with the idea that god created the world, our universe. Nobody asks what occurs at the God’s level. Has he brothers, sisters, parents? Such questions would be considered real blasphemies by every Christian believer. In Christianity, our world, the single interesting us, had a beginning and, consequently, will have an end, which will be a collective one. Thereafter, the individual’s happiness cannot be found but in the middle of the collectivity inside of which he lives. Extreme-Oriental religions start from a more general concept: Universe is immutable and infinite in time and space. Every individual has fallen off from there by an accident and he will come back after several reincarnations. His unhappiness and the getting of his happiness are personal affairs without any link with the others. Both for oriental and occidental believers, absolute happiness is intangible in real life, but it is promise in after-life. Till then, man must keep the moral principles of the society where he lives, principles established by the religion for which that cosmogony was imagined. Only keeping the general-accepted ethic, the extreme-oriental man might come back in the original universe and the Christian one to reach in Heaven and not in Hell.
The Greeks imagined a mythology specific for a society composed of slaves and free men, where the position of everyone is predetermined, anterior established, but the interval between deities and men is populated with semi-deities, heroes, etc, so that there is a chance for anyone to build his own future.
From these three categories above-mentioned, result three very different types of human behaviours.
Today, most people admit neither a cosmogony or religion and want to feel free of any constraint, ready to do everything cross their mind. From homosexuality to toxico-mania, everything – if is not admissible yet – it must become free as soon as possible. Although there is not yet an adequate cosmogony, the absence of any ethic criterions tends to become a new religion. If it will be so, surely it will be the last one.
Fortunately, nothing from these will happen and the humanity will go on in his oscillations between the two extremes – dictatorship and democracy – as he always did when he did not succeeded in keeping a rational equilibrium between them. It is expected that nowadays-oratorical excesses for democracy, destined to disguise the trend toward the dictatorship, to disappear in one way or another. "History repeats itself in the large scheme of things because human nature changes with geological leisureliness" say us an English maxim.
But, the Catholics did not give up to coquette with philosophy and probably still strive for inscribing famous names on their frontispiece. One of the latest found was Henry Bergson. He is an appreciated philosopher, and the Catholics’ joy was wondrous when converted him from Judaism to Christianity. Unfortunately for them, Bergson, along with his convert, entered politics and produced nothing new on philosophic or religious field, and what he had written before is not useful for Catholic doctrine. "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" (1932) really is a quintessence of his thought, but it synthesizes his older ideas, even if it was written later. He insists a lot on the élan vital, or vital force, but the idea is neither very new (Schopenhauer did it much better) nor convincing. What he strives to explain very well is the complementarity of religion and reason, looked as natural, human, tendencies. He does not speak explicitly about a certain religion, but about religion generally, the role of which is to establish some traditions with final effect in ethics. Bergson is not at all a theologian. Excepting some declarations of complaisance, he remains a philosopher, a very good analyst, which gives me the possibility to agree with him, at least partially. I like especially his comparison with the pendulum, which, after every deviation, comes back to the normal position, even if only for an instant, in his way toward the opposite position. It happens the same in nature, for the closed societies, as he named them. Still, humanity is an open society, because it evolves thanks to men’s innovative character. Unfortunately, so far, his evolution was unidirectional, with a catastrophic end, because the pendulum does not give signs to come back.
Bergson also relates with stupor about two "foreign nobles, came from far, but dressed like us (French), walking among us, amiable and affable, but which, after a little time, turned in their country and affiliated at two different parties, one of them sent the other to the hanging, only for getting rid of an uncomfortable adversary". Bergson did not have time to know Pol Pot and his team massacring the Cambodians. I do not know how accidentally they had been "educated" in Paris, learning from Sartre his theory of "necessary violence" ("Genuine freedom can only be gained by collective revolutionary action").
I am not a philosopher but in etymological sense of the word: love (philo) for wisdom (sophia), especially when wisdom belongs to others. This position offers to me the advantage that I may express my opinions more freely than a professional one. Even Ortega y Gasset encourages me, saying that "philosophy keeps its virginity in spite of its repeated violations". So, if it resisted to Nietzsche or Kant, how much of what someone like me says could count. Surely, philosophy so philosophy is not in danger.
It is clear: we need salvation. If it comes only from God, the question is "which God? The benevolent or the punishing one?" I would dare a puerile answer: if God is our father, then maybe he treats us like a parent. As a sage one, who prepares his children for life, or as a stupid one, who only coddle them?
As a parent, God teaches us lessons according to our age. If sometimes his indications seem to be contradictory, it does not mean that he is inconsequent, but that we are in another stage of our evolution. Consequently, the Bible could not be a unique document. In the meantime, we grew up a little, don’t we? Maybe we overpass the age of abecedary. A thing is sure: God did not give the Bible to Adam when he banished him from the Garden of Eden to have it as an orientation guide. He gave it later to humanity. And, even later, he sent Jesus for conveying a message to us, completing the Bible in this way with several chapters. Do we have reasons to think that he did not go on sending to us other messages? If he went on giving us messages - and it would be normal to do so - then our problem is to pick up these messages, to interpret and apply them. As long as we confine ourselves to interpret – mostly wrong – the same book, written several thousands of years ago surely we are no longer under God’s leading.
In the other part of the world, independent of the Christianity, there live people of an older faith, whom we prefer to ignore. Still, political games of the 20th century were made by Mao. If for each Chinese, one would require 100 grams more of rice – like the German model – then world’s economy would be messed up. Mao was the one who governed them. As a communist country, if he would cooperate with the USSR, the world supremacy would belong to them. Stalinist or Nazi decisions in China would be catastrophic for wide world. Still, Mao discerned the weaknesses of Soviet system and repudiated the offer. In this way, the balance of power remained equal.
And Mao had another quality as well: he did not prohibit any religion. As a matter of fact, he would not have the possibility to do it, as oriental religion are not hierarchic organized, like the European ones, so he did not have what to dissolve. In the Orient, religion and wisdom, sometime, are confounded each other and I do not see how could someone to forbid the wisdom. With all his mistakes, and there were a lot, we must recognize that few occidental political leaders were at his level. From classic German philosophy to Hitler, from French revolution, with it equalizer excitations, to the Soviet communism, the road of our stupidity always was paved with good intentions, but with what effects? One thing is certain: we must rethink our philosophy or, more exactly, to think it, as what we love to call rational, logical, proved to be only the product of our desires. Logics can bring forth paradoxes.
We may speak about two currents in philosophy: one that regards it as any science that has its field and the other, which consider that only a history of philosophy is interesting, that a philosophy as it does not exist, but only people philosophising. Kant is a supporter of the first current. He thinks that philosophy must be approached frontal, as any science, and not through the prism of the evolution of our knowledge about it, as the real world does not change it laws according with our knowledge. He is obstinate in thinking that a field of philosophy even exists and build something that seemed to be the most solid system philosophic. It was not long and his "formidable" system, in spite of its rigour – which really is remarkable – proved to have even more flaws than other older systems. It seems that the sore point of Philosophy is just the inconsistence of its field. If in the past philosophy included all thinking fields, in time, every science delimited and extract its particular field. Finally, we ask ourselves: what remains for philosophy? It remains just the history of them, but not exposed pedant, with affectation, for showing author’s glitter, but a part of the history of civilisation, because, it shows us – together with the other sciences – the way in which our civilisation developed itself. In fact, history itself would be a history of human thought and not of some events or personalities. Louis XIV, for example, known as the Son King, is shown as the most representative exponent of the monarchy, was in reality the one who – by his exaggerations and the futility of his intellect – contributed to the destruction of the monarchy.
Sometimes, we speak about happiness, even if we could not imagine it. Dante reaches only as far as the doorway of Paradise, without entering inside, just because Virgil cannot imagine happiness. As for the biblical Heaven, probably we will bore ourselves after a short time. Instead, we cannot only imagine very well Hell, but we are able to improve it with our imagination. If we endeavour with the same diligence to improve the conditions from our earthy purgatory, surely we feel much better.
There are persons thinking that happiness consists in doing nothing. It is obvious that it is not true, as persons that succeed in doing nothing are not happy. Theoretically, there are more three possibilities besides the one that I have just discussed:
• to want to do nothing and, still, to do something;
• to want to do something, but not to do;
• to want to do something and to do it.
The first one seems to be absurd: how not to want, and still to do and be happy for it. The second is a sure way toward the discontent because you did not attain to do what you have proposed, so the opposite of the happiness. The third one, even if it seems odd, is identical with the initial hypothesis. To do nothing, to do almost nothing, to do something, to do very much etc., are stairs both for wish and for act. What counts for happiness is not the level on which they are, but the rapport between their postures. In other words, our mood depends on their posture on two different stairs.
It remains the second variant, initial considered absurd and over which it seems we pass too fast. Is it possible this one to be the true one? To do something that I had not proposed really seems absurd. It is true that I can enjoy for a thing already done and for it I must no longer take great pains, not even to think about it. But how to do something without thinking to do it?
An example is crossing my mind. Many men think the shaving as plague and – if they allow – do it as rare as they can. I thought so until I learnt that it is easier to do it daily than aleatory. Since then I shave myself in every morning, immediately after getting up from the bed and before waking completely. I do not have think about it, because it already is a reflex action. The fact that during the day I always am fresh gives me a sentiment – if not of happiness – at least of normality. Otherwise, I should feel more then unhappy. (I do not insist!)
My example is a very small one. The question is if this logic works in other serious cases too. If yes, then how could we do unconsciously something that could bring us some satisfactions?
Here is another example. While I was reading a book, an idea crossed my mind. It came alone. I did not know that it would come, so I could not want it. Of course, I enjoyed. Still, the idea did not come just by itself. The lecture of the book suggested it to me. So, I was doing something, but not a hard work. I was revelling in it. Here, maybe I am a little wrong. Someone, sometime, made me not only to read, but to learn the alphabet as well. Later, like the shave, it became a reflex action and now I can enjoy of its advantage, because I forgot its disadvantages, although a child learns many things by playing and does them with pleasure. More unpleasant was when, during the play, I was hurting at my knees. I remember it because they were aching.
But, what I was speaking about? Ah, yes, about happiness. No, it does not come from the knees. The tradition might have a role.
I read now, after I wrote so much about religion, what I should have read first: Kant’s "Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason Alone".It begins well! I remark that his starting position confirms my intuition. Kant first asks himself if man is naturally good or evil. He ascertains that man is evil, but has a tendency to become good. In other words, he would want to do well, but did not succeed. Hereinafter, I observe that Kant’s approach is based on a relative reference point: morale. Besides, for Kant, the morale means the law. But law is a consequence, a synthesis of a way of life, of a society, of our society, of our philosophy. To search the fundamental truth starting from its last consequences in a society that evaluated itself at random, means to put the cart before the horses, with the observation that a team like this could go, even more difficult, unlike Kant’s logic, which does not work at all. A great scholar said: "Give me a fulcrum and I overturn the earth". He refers the principle of levers.
Well, just the fulcrum is not stable at Kant’s theory, as a mater of fact, it does not exist, because the moral law is a consequence and not a cause. And then, the whole philosophic building is aerial, artificial. After some divagations, Kant finally affirms firmly: "Man is evil naturally" (chapter II). Besides, he tries to identify "the origin of Evil in human nature" (chapter IV). Then, like in any well-written novel, the hope appears: there is in man "a genuine predisposition toward the Well". Namely, man is naturally evil, but inclined toward the Well. Reading these pages, I imagined man on a pedestal of Evil, looking down, where the Well used to be and toward which he was inclined, and I was afraid for him not to become dizzy, knowing about a sure predisposition of him, the vertigo, which is natural. Less fearful, Kant still identified a danger of man’s inclination toward the Well: if we leave it at the will of hazard and develops itself irresponsible. Of course, Kant does not note it without purpose. Immediately he offers us his solution: the religion. Finally, he adverts us to the "bad ministration" of religion by the priests, so that after we whirled like a cat around his tail, we ask ourselves: what is the use of this talk about Well and Evil? Now, Kant seems to be a sincere believer, which explains in a certain measure his logic (or its lack). I recognize that, after this remark, the man Kant seems to me almost tolerable, more human, if I may express this way. But, he become again a philosopher, needs to get us out from the circle within we endlessly circumrotate and gives us the final solution: Pure Reason. Theoretically, it is perfect, at least in his imagination, but practically he offers nothing. Kant stops here, and I think the he does very well. His whole building seems a simple philosophic exercise,
unfortunately with the same obsession: Pure Reason. The idea of a pure reason could be agreeable, but – as religion was "badly ministered" by the priests (when their reason disappeared), the reason as well could lead toward negative consequences. We already knew some. In conclusion, any exaggeration is looser.
Now, the true philosophers make more and more literature. In other words, they express the ideas in a way accessible for all educated readers. Sometimes it is difficult what to call them: philosophers or writers? On the other hand, scholars from other fields need at old age to convey their personal meditations. In this way, the philosophy comes again in the area of love (philo) of wise (sophia), not through the contribution of its "professionals" but through that of the real thinkers, if this term is not rather pretentious.