Last night, I was reading a book about philosophy. It was a novel to be exact, but the thought is philosophical.
The first thing that I noticed on the book is the way it questions life in the way we live. It came to the point that you cannot experience being alive without realizing that you have to die. The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask few philosophical questions, in a simply and absurd way as possible. For instance, how was the world created? Is there an end or not? Why are we here? What is our purpose?
People have been asking these questions throughout the ages. We know of no culture which has not concerned itself with what man is and where the world came from. History presents us with many different answers to each question, thus it is easier to ask philosophical questions than to answer them. So even if it is difficult to answer a question, there may be one- and only one- right answer. Either there is a kind of existence after death—or there is not. In this case we have to realize that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception, we are part of it. Nothing can come out of nothing, and nothing that exist can become nothing. Remember that there was no such thing as actual change. Nothing could become anything other than it was.
To be a philosopher is to be a detective, and the only thing that requires us to be a philosopher is the faculty of wonder. I just hope that people don’t grow up to be one of those who take the world for granted. The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lost the ability to wonder about the world. And for somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought. For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background. It seems like we’ve just grown so used to the world that nothing surprises us anymore.
Philosophy separates myths and god, maybe because a true philosopher is skeptic and questions different beliefs. They are unique and different, and they don’t need to be like the others because for them, they are already special. People who believe in any imaginary gods are people who believe easily in the things around them. They simply stop thinking and start believing. People had always felt a need to explain the process of nature. Perhaps they could not live without such explanations. And that they made up all those myths in the time before there was anything called science.
The point here is what solutions we arrived at, but which questions they asked and what type of answer we are looking for. We are more interested in how they thought than in exactly what they thought. A true philosopher know how to posed questions relating to the transformations, they could observe in the physical world. They were looking for the underlying laws of nature, and they wanted to understand the actual processes by studying nature itself. This just means that philosophy gradually liberated itself from religion. We could simply say that the natural philosophers took the first step in the direction of scientific reasoning, thereby becoming the precursors of what was to become science.
If you were to choose between relying either on senses or reason, choose reason. Remember that our senses give us an incorrect picture of the world, a picture that does not tally with our reason. We need to see it as the task to expose all form of perceptual illusion. Remember that we need to be rational, and all humans are rational. We are born to be one, and this unshakable faith in human reason is called rationalism. A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.
ABE
