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| Some Metaphysics of Civilization |
Human civilization has evolved under its own law, no matter the law is divinely set (as religiously faithful people including myself believe) or naturally formed (as naturalists believe). The metaphysics of civilization is about some general features of the civilization when we take a bird view of it. Even though no one person might be able to provide a detailed description of the variety of today’s human civilization, we might notice that the complex of the civilization is built on top of some fundamentals. Here I would like to divide the fundamentals of the civilization into some basic parts. Before I even go into the description of the division, I need to make it very clear that by no means I am trying to declare the division I am making here is the inclusively best division. Even I myself might find a better way to do it tomorrow. However, I am doing the division here as I am doing just because I have some special feeling about the division so far.
Based on my current knowledge about the human civilization I would divide the fundamentals of it into the following parts: Religion, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, Art. Religion is something very special not only because Religion concerns supernatural but also because so far people around the world are still very hard to get common opinion about Religion. Therefore, I would not discuss Religion and the influence of Religion in this particular article.
Well, someone might ask what about Engineering, Technology, Politics, Medicine, Economics, etc. In my opinion, those are mixtures of or built on top of the four fundamentals of Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, and Art. We might borrow a buzz word from the financial industry for them: deritives.
Then what are special about those four fundamentals? This might sound like a very simple question. But it has not been very simple in practice, especially among scholars. More and more philosophers in North America have joined a team whose interest is to turn Philosophy into a Science. Most people would consider Mathematics is part of Science. Art is viewed as a specialty by most people, but more and more people would consider that artistic is also something that could be achieved by means of Science. As a result, it seems that besides Religion, everything could be a part of Science.
In fact, the fundamental difference between Philosophy and Science was first perceived by ancient Greek scholars: Philosophy is about wisdom and Science is about knowing things. Confusing, right? To most people including most nowadays philosophers, the meaning of wisdom is about knowing things and the one who knows better is the one who is smarter. This might be a common sense we could learn from daily life, but it is not precisely true. Being smart in general does not necessarily demand clarity of details, but knowing things especially knowing how to do things generally demands clarity, which is the fundamental difference between philosophy and science. This subtle difference which might have confused most people in fact is the reason for philosophy to stay as philosophy and science to stay as science no matter how many people or how many elite philosophers would like to turn philosophy into science. The demand of clarity of details warrants all basic characteristics of science which has been the topics of Philosophy of Science, such as scientific results should be repeatable, etc. Human wisdom could be sensed by each other among those of close intellectual level through intelligent resonance, but science demands a lot debate and proofs to clarify the details.
Mathematics is about quantifiable relationship. Both Philosophy and Science are very closely related to Mathematics indeed. But Mathematics does not speak in common language as Philosophy does, and Mathematics does not provide details of protocols as science does.
Art is a non-language expression of human feelings about the cosmos. I am not trying to say literary writing is not an art. What I am trying to say here might be that the language part of the literary is not Art, but the magical use of language to form a literary work is Art. It might sound confusing. Well, partly because I am not an artist and I am even not artistic myself, partly because fundamentals are normally all confusing, like the line between Philosophy and Science as I mentioned previously.
As a closing sentence for this article, I would like to point out that an achievement of human civilization, no matter scientifically or mathematically or artistically achieved, would not be fully digested until philosophers could make a clear statement about it….
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Posted by murongqingcao on 2009-04-21 10:29:35 | Rating: | Views: 53
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