the question in philosophy, at least one of them, lies in
the idea that philosophy is a mirror of nature....
that if we look at philosophy, we see nature as it is....
that the ''truth'' is just a reflection of nature...that reality
resembles the ''truth''....and the ''truth resembles reality''
but even a casual glance at philosophy disproves this....
let us take an historical idea... that idea of Machiavelli that
a human being is either good or evil their entire life...
as he says, a leopard can never change their spots and
humans being born bad/evil can never change their spots..
this take as a truism... or change their innate nature... but this
is clearly not true.... many such events can change a person's very
nature... death, an illness, being in war or being in a very dramatic
situation like living in Gaza today.. any one of these events can
be enough to change our very nature.. I have seen such events change
the nature of even old people....
human being are not fix, set for live... we couldn't have survive
these past millions years or so without some basic flexibility, both
in body and in spirit....
here we have a truism that is not true...a philosophy that fails to
understand nature...
philosophy is not a mirror of existence, not of us and not of events around
us...so much of our ''knowledge'' is from our childhood indoctrinations and
education, which is basically another form of indoctrinations...
how can philosophy be a mirror of nature if the mirror is flat out wrong!
so is it possible to have a clear and unprejudiced view of the world,
as in a mirror?
I don't see how...every viewpoint is a viewpoint from somewhere..
and that is, by its very nature, prejudiced and biased...
full of preconceptions and partiality.....
there is no being on earth that is absent of bias or preconceptions....
even computers are biased because whoever programmed it, programmed
his/her biases into the programming... and within animals, their programming
are instincts... which was done by nature and evolution and probability....
no matter which ''mirror'' we use, that mirror is biased by its programming..
ever see a funhouse mirror? even that viewpoint is biased....
a mirror can be made to be biased... there is no mirror from which
we can get an honest, unbiased opinion of, well... anything...
so, how do we get an unbiased opinion of nature from an already biased
mirror?
every single fact, opinion and point of view, is a biased one...and if it
isn't biased, it has no real value for us.... take the notion that
Abe Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States....
that is not an opinion, it is fact, but a fact that really doesn't tell
us anything...it reflects nothing in its mirror...we can stare
at that fact until the end of time, and it still won't mean anything
that has value or use for us...it is an empty fact which has no value
for us.......
a good many ''facts'' are facts, that mean nothing until we make something of it...
it is by putting these facts into context that allows opinions and facts to
have some meaning....which is essentially, interpretation of the mirror
that we see... we see an object and then we have to make sense of it,
to interpret it...to give those objects in the mirror some context....
and that is why the idea of philosophy being mirror of reality makes
no sense because philosophy itself is simple an interpretation of what
we see... to be blunt... there is no mirror that accurately reflects
what it see... because everything seen in a mirror must be interpreted
to make sense...and that interpretation cannot be a straight forward
interpretation because everything must be put into context and putting that
into context, changes the very nature of what is reflected in the mirror....
Kropotkin