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| Crisis of Philosophy |
As human civilization irreversibly enters the postmodern age, we are witnessing a weird devolution (here I indeed mean "degradation". But I use "devolution" as a contrast to "evolution") of collective wisdom of our species while human beings are biologically as well as knowledge wise (scientifically and technologically) continuing to evolve. In fact, this devolution seemed to start around 2000 years ago. During this process of devolution the kinetics of human collective wisdom experienced some bumpy up-and-downs. About 300 years ago there was a heavy bumps brought about by Kant followed by Hegel, Nietzsche and a few others, and then finally the kinetics seemed to be all consumed once the so called postmodern age was officially viewed to have started, and the main enthusiasm of main stream philosophers is now trying to convince the public that “Philosophy is dead” or “Philosophy is going to die pretty soon”.
This trend of devolution of wisdom reminds me of some ancient saying that some very smart people injected huge wisdom doses into human civilization very long time ago and thus we could have a luxury to consume the wisdom from those smart ancestors. We may find different versions of this kind of saying in different cultures, but with very similar pictures. Some gods who lived on this earth long time ago were believed by ancient Greeks as the source of wisdom. “Old time sages” were mentioned many times in the ancient Chinese philosophical writing Tao Te Ching which was written about 2500 years ago. We could also find similar story about very outstanding people of long time ago from the Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of the human beings and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.”
A stone of wisdom dropped into the peaceful pond of human civilization and then the wave of wisdom riddled out for thousands of years and then dying out in our time. Is this what those ancient stories tell us? Of course not! But the undertone of the end of philosophy from the main stream philosophers could tell us that the meaning of philosophy---love and pursue of wisdom is collectively dying out on this globe called Earth.
Simply speaking we are facing a global crisis of philosophy on the globe. The following are some well known symptoms of this crisis:
1) World-wide main stream philosophers fail to respond to the Postmodern challenge from scientific development, information technology dynamics, financial industrial complexion, new world ethic concepts, etc. Basically, philosophers totally fail to take their responsibility of summarizing and overviewing the progress of human civilization.
2) World-wide main stream philosophers fail to demonstrate much new philosophical enlightenment into basic metaphysics and general logic. Instead, they are claiming that philosophy is dead while their main responsibility is supposed to provide philosophical insight for citizens of this globe. As a result, philosophy has lost its leadership position in this new age of human civilization.
3) Theologians fail to answer questions raised by the development of science and social reality.
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Posted by murongqingcao on 2009-06-19 16:18:38 | Rating: | Views: 43
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