A Modust Proposal
Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2019 6:51 pm
If youth is wasted on the young, philosophy is wasted on the old.. The time to teach it is when people can use it.. Anyone older who learns philosophy has already wound the mainspring of their lives and are set upon their course, and have wondered into it, and touched it in passing.. Philosophy should be taught to hasten and organize education.. If knowledge is judgement then life is no series of impression, or facts learned by rote; but is the ability to judge between this and that..
Without the language of philosophy I struggled to sort out morality because in my youth, morality was little evident.. People struggle today with morality because it is not taught and cannot be known by example.. Morality, as Socrates' Good- cannot be conceived of, and so cannot be taught.. Yet people are moral without a lesson because they are so -irrationally, and so pre-rationally.. It is emotional bonds, and irrational bonds which makes one moral.. It is as impossible to cut ethics loose from philosophy, and yet the tools of philosophy are useless for the understanding of morality.. If people talk about morality, many choose to invoke religion when religion is only a parasite on morality.. In the middle ages, with a cut of a razor religion was removed from philosophy, but morality as ethics is a fee both claim..
Friends; this is not child's play.. Philosophy is the basis of all we know in life to be good, for to have good. people had to go at it with a purpose.. This is like tying ones shoes, and no one would wish their child to trip, and everyone allows children to be tripped by their process of thought. I am not proposing that people be taught what to think for that is what we have.. Rather; people, children must be handed the tools of thought and not forced to find them through the maze of misinformation.. To teach philosophy is to teach people how to think..
Napoleon called those who were studying ideas: Ideologues.. Yet it is ideas as discrete elements of knowledge that must be taught.. What is an idea? It is not purely analogy; but mostly it is.. What we know, we can make, reproduce, and teach.. Nature teaches, we learn, we recreate nature better to serve us.. Between thought and thing lies an abyss of difference, Heterogeneity; and yet there are areas of agreement: Homogeneity, with the bridge between these two being Analogy.. Duns Scottus. -If every child learned to judge reality by forming an analogy of reality, this would speed and organize education.. Children are like the near sighted gazing at the stars.. What do they see?? If you cannot tell stars from space you will never see time as a translation of space..
Children are incredibly near sighted. They see what is in front of them well.. If they are inclined to waste time as we see it, it is because they cannot conceive of it, and to relate it to space is hardly an accurate symmetry.. The true relation of time is to life; that is: A moral rather than a physical analogy.. If youth is a waste of time, then that is our fault because now WE know better.. If we choose to allow youth to be a social event rather than a milestone of learning, then that is by default.. We are not trying to give children what they need.. We do not fail entirely by allowing the social aspects of youth to dominate because social relations will dominate through all of life.. Our success and happiness depends upon the ability to relate, our relationships.. And people are like the blind who cannot see beyond their own sense of touch.. Some of us get along well that way.. Children knowing little feel much.. As a political and social reality; as Nietzsche and Freud among others went to pains to point out: people are not rational.. They are never taught to be rational, to reason and to judge the quality of their reasoning objectively.. We braille our ways through life, and those with the best senses win..
Children who have no philosophy are left to grasp at the straws of knowledge while drowning in a pool of confused impression.. We may know what we feel.. We do not see how to feel with others, or make others feel as we feel.. We are trapped in individuality when loneliness is the disease of our age..No part of this, no matter how much it leads to unhappiness is dangerous.. What is dangerous is so many living a lonely, isolated and vulnerable existence.. Hitler was not the first person to understand that the masses can be moved by emotions.. The madness of the many is a weakness for any society because it can be turned with equal energy on friend or foe alike.. War is the export of injustice.. Injustice long endured is madness, but the moral bonds we accept and feel while sneered at by some keeps us at peace with exploiters and willing to turn ourselves against all of humanity- for a feeling- of nation..To change the world we need only change the way people feel about it.. This is the specter of ruin, of war, of disease, destruction and misery.. People are hung by their heartstrings.. I know people will feel.. I want them to think..
Today our children are not being taught how to think, and without thought, knowledge is given, but is never certain.. If knowledge is virtue it is because it inhibits action.. It is a brake on stupidity.. Aristotle said that the line between vice and virtue divides all of mankind.. From my perspective, that line divides reason from morality as well as humanity.. Pure thought is plasma, and cannot be touched..Morality without thought is dangerous, but thought without morality is death.. Even if you think of education as a social and moral experience, a chance to exercise and strengthen the bonds of society, you still need to give people the protection of reason.. We learned in the last century a tyranny of the ideal.. We are still trapped by one of those ideals.. When children are handed their ideas fully formed, as a definition in a dictionary which they cannot question they are put in a dangerous, even a precarious position.. Murder by the many of millions was accomplished with no better tool than an ideal no one could question.. Children must learn to write dictionaries instead of reading them.. Philosophy gives to every individual the ultimate freedom of questioning authority, even intellectual authority; and even the authority of an accepted ideal.. Every idea is a kernel of truth.. The analogy between thought, and thing must be true; and children in education are set free to find that truth..
Without the language of philosophy I struggled to sort out morality because in my youth, morality was little evident.. People struggle today with morality because it is not taught and cannot be known by example.. Morality, as Socrates' Good- cannot be conceived of, and so cannot be taught.. Yet people are moral without a lesson because they are so -irrationally, and so pre-rationally.. It is emotional bonds, and irrational bonds which makes one moral.. It is as impossible to cut ethics loose from philosophy, and yet the tools of philosophy are useless for the understanding of morality.. If people talk about morality, many choose to invoke religion when religion is only a parasite on morality.. In the middle ages, with a cut of a razor religion was removed from philosophy, but morality as ethics is a fee both claim..
Friends; this is not child's play.. Philosophy is the basis of all we know in life to be good, for to have good. people had to go at it with a purpose.. This is like tying ones shoes, and no one would wish their child to trip, and everyone allows children to be tripped by their process of thought. I am not proposing that people be taught what to think for that is what we have.. Rather; people, children must be handed the tools of thought and not forced to find them through the maze of misinformation.. To teach philosophy is to teach people how to think..
Napoleon called those who were studying ideas: Ideologues.. Yet it is ideas as discrete elements of knowledge that must be taught.. What is an idea? It is not purely analogy; but mostly it is.. What we know, we can make, reproduce, and teach.. Nature teaches, we learn, we recreate nature better to serve us.. Between thought and thing lies an abyss of difference, Heterogeneity; and yet there are areas of agreement: Homogeneity, with the bridge between these two being Analogy.. Duns Scottus. -If every child learned to judge reality by forming an analogy of reality, this would speed and organize education.. Children are like the near sighted gazing at the stars.. What do they see?? If you cannot tell stars from space you will never see time as a translation of space..
Children are incredibly near sighted. They see what is in front of them well.. If they are inclined to waste time as we see it, it is because they cannot conceive of it, and to relate it to space is hardly an accurate symmetry.. The true relation of time is to life; that is: A moral rather than a physical analogy.. If youth is a waste of time, then that is our fault because now WE know better.. If we choose to allow youth to be a social event rather than a milestone of learning, then that is by default.. We are not trying to give children what they need.. We do not fail entirely by allowing the social aspects of youth to dominate because social relations will dominate through all of life.. Our success and happiness depends upon the ability to relate, our relationships.. And people are like the blind who cannot see beyond their own sense of touch.. Some of us get along well that way.. Children knowing little feel much.. As a political and social reality; as Nietzsche and Freud among others went to pains to point out: people are not rational.. They are never taught to be rational, to reason and to judge the quality of their reasoning objectively.. We braille our ways through life, and those with the best senses win..
Children who have no philosophy are left to grasp at the straws of knowledge while drowning in a pool of confused impression.. We may know what we feel.. We do not see how to feel with others, or make others feel as we feel.. We are trapped in individuality when loneliness is the disease of our age..No part of this, no matter how much it leads to unhappiness is dangerous.. What is dangerous is so many living a lonely, isolated and vulnerable existence.. Hitler was not the first person to understand that the masses can be moved by emotions.. The madness of the many is a weakness for any society because it can be turned with equal energy on friend or foe alike.. War is the export of injustice.. Injustice long endured is madness, but the moral bonds we accept and feel while sneered at by some keeps us at peace with exploiters and willing to turn ourselves against all of humanity- for a feeling- of nation..To change the world we need only change the way people feel about it.. This is the specter of ruin, of war, of disease, destruction and misery.. People are hung by their heartstrings.. I know people will feel.. I want them to think..
Today our children are not being taught how to think, and without thought, knowledge is given, but is never certain.. If knowledge is virtue it is because it inhibits action.. It is a brake on stupidity.. Aristotle said that the line between vice and virtue divides all of mankind.. From my perspective, that line divides reason from morality as well as humanity.. Pure thought is plasma, and cannot be touched..Morality without thought is dangerous, but thought without morality is death.. Even if you think of education as a social and moral experience, a chance to exercise and strengthen the bonds of society, you still need to give people the protection of reason.. We learned in the last century a tyranny of the ideal.. We are still trapped by one of those ideals.. When children are handed their ideas fully formed, as a definition in a dictionary which they cannot question they are put in a dangerous, even a precarious position.. Murder by the many of millions was accomplished with no better tool than an ideal no one could question.. Children must learn to write dictionaries instead of reading them.. Philosophy gives to every individual the ultimate freedom of questioning authority, even intellectual authority; and even the authority of an accepted ideal.. Every idea is a kernel of truth.. The analogy between thought, and thing must be true; and children in education are set free to find that truth..