Jaspers: The essence of philosophy is to seek the truth, not to possess it

Wen 丨 Jaspers

Excerpt from | Introduction to Philosophy

01 What is philosophy?

The question of what philosophy is and how valuable it is has been controversial.

Some people, with a respectful attitude, regard philosophy as a great undertaking of special people; others despise it as the whims of dreamers, and some people think that philosophy is a cause that has a relationship with everyone, so it must be concise and understandable in essence; others do not regard philosophy as something unattainable and unattainable.

For thousands of years, philosophy has been striving to acquire knowledge that is acceptable to all, but it has always had little effect and is difficult to fulfill; but science has achieved some success.

Philosophical thinking, unlike science, does not have the character of a progressive process. There is no doubt that contemporary physicians are certainly much more advanced than the ancient Greek physician Hippokrates, but we are not necessarily more advanced than Plato. We are superior to Plato only in the possession of scientific knowledge. As far as philosophical thinking is concerned, we may not yet reach the depths that Plato reached.

Philosophos – This Greek word is the opposite of the word Sophos. It means that the person who loves to know (the essence) is different from the person who possesses knowledge. The meaning of the word remains to this day: the essence of philosophy is to seek truth, not to possess it. Philosophy is the process of moving forward. The questions that philosophy asks are more important than the answers, and each answer leads to new questions.

Thales, the originator of the Greek philosopher, was ridiculed by the maid because she saw Thales accidentally fall into the well because he observed the starry night sky: if he was so clumsy with the things under his eyes, why bother to explore the space thousands of miles away?

02 The Origin of Philosophy

As methodological thinking, the history of philosophy originated twenty-five hundred years ago; as mythological thinking, it originated in earlier times.

The origins of philosophy are manifold. Doubts and knowledge arise from astonishment; doubts about what is already known form a critical examination and a clear conclusion is drawn; from man's shock and consciousness of loss, the question of questioning oneself is raised. Let us now begin with a discussion of these three motives.

First, Plato said, the origin of philosophy is consternation. Our eyes give us a "glimpse of the stars, the sun, and the firmament," and this glimpse gives us "the urge to explore all things." And so philosophy arises in our hearts...". Aristotle said it best: "For surprise is the impetus for philosophical thinking, and man is first surprised by the strange things he encounters, and then gradually explores the moon, the sun, the changes of the stars, and the origin of all things." "Surprise forces one to know. Philosophical thinking lies precisely in waking up to the needs of life. This awakening manifests itself in a glimpse of freedom of things, the firmament, and the world. The question it asks is what all of this is all about, and where all of this comes from—the search for answers to these questions has no practical purpose, but merely a form of self-satisfaction.

Doubt, which, as methodological doubt, becomes the source of a critical examination of every kind of knowledge, so it can be said that there can be no real philosophical activity without radical doubt. But what is decisive is how and where to gain a firm foothold through doubt itself.

Knowing the things of the world, I can acquire reliable knowledge only through the means of doubt. I did not do this for my own sake, not in my purpose, in my happiness, in my peace. In the process of knowing, I was mostly oblivious and self-satisfied.

We are always in a certain situation. The situation will change, and the situation will also appear, but if it is missed, it is a rare opportunity. I myself can work to change a situation. But there are situations which, by their very nature, cannot be changed (although the present phenomena of these conditions will be different, and their irresistible power will be concealed). These situations are: I will die, I will suffer, I must get up and fight... We call these basic conditions marginal conditions (the philosophical concept of marginal conditions is an important concept of German existentialism. —Translator). That is to say, these conditions are inescapable and cannot be changed. After being stunned and skeptical, I gradually realized that these marginal conditions were the deepest origins of philosophy.

The world as a whole cannot be trusted. But after all, there are still things in this world that can be trusted and arouse our trust, and the basis that supports us is: the hometown and the landscape of the hometown, parents and ancestors, brothers and sisters and friends, and our wives and wives.

Man is looking for relief. It is only the great religions that are all-encompassing point to the path to liberation.

Plato and Aristotle looked out for the essence of existence in amazement.

The Stoic scholars, on the other hand, searched for peace of mind in the midst of the sufferings of life.

03 Thoughts about God

Our Western ideas about God have two major roots from a historical perspective: the Bible and Greek philosophy.

Plato believed that God (whom he called good) was the origin of all knowledge.

The Greek philosophers understood God this way: according to the ethical point of view, there are polytheses; but from the point of view of nature, there is only one God. God is not something we can see with the naked eye, he has no resemblance to anyone; God cannot be recognized from a portrait.

God is seen as the rationality of the world or the laws of the world, or as fate and providence, as the architect of the world. Western theology and philosophy proceed from these two roots, endlessly pondering where God exists or does not exist, and what God is.

Our contemporary philosophers are evasive to the question of whether there is a God or not. They neither assert nor deny the existence of God. But whoever is engaged in philosophical activity has to talk about this question. However, limited to the limited level of modern knowledge, that is, limited to scientific knowledge, philosophers stop thinking about God when they are philosophically thinking. Because their motto is: Man should be silent about what he cannot know.

The discussion of the question of God is based on contradictory principles, and we shall now analyse them separately as follows:

The theological principle is that God is known for us, because God is revealed from the prophet to Jesus. For us, god does not exist without display. God does not exist in the mind, but in the worship of faith.

Contrary to the theological principle, there is an ancient philosophical principle: God is known to us because His existence is proved. Since ancient times, the whole proof of God is indeed a great document.

But it would be a mistake to understand the proof of God in the sense of mathematics or empirical science, that is, to regard it as a strict scientific proof.

To deny the proof of God means that God does not exist.

Of course, this reasoning is wrong. For it is difficult to prove the existence of God, but it is equally difficult to deny his existence. Proving His existence and denying His existence simply means that there is no God who can prove it, and if there is, it is only a thing in the world.

In fact, the proofs of God that people have thought of and have been constantly changing for thousands of years are incompatible with scientific proofs.

Let's take a few examples:

The oldest proof is the proof of cosmology. From the universe (the universe is the name the Greeks called the world) one can deduce God: from the root of all phenomena in this infinite world, it can be deduced to the final cause; from the motion to the cause of motion; from the contingency of individual things to the inevitability of the whole.

Facts have repeatedly pointed out that God is not the object of knowledge, nor is God the object of sensory experience. God is invisible, He cannot be seen, but can only be believed.

So the God that people believe in is the God who is far away from us, the God who is hidden, the God who cannot be proved.

In this way, not only did I realize that I did not know God, but even I did not know whether I believed in Him or not.

Philosophy is not giving, it can only awaken – it can help people recall, strengthen beliefs and defenses.

04 persons

What is a person? Physiology treats him as a body; psychology treats him as a mind; and sociology studies him as a gregarious creature. Man as we know it is a nature, just like the nature of other creatures we know. We see man as history, and we know this history through a critical, de-falsified study of legends, by understanding the common meaning of man's actions and thoughts, by explaining what has happened from the point of view of motives, conditions, and natural reality. Our study of man yields a great deal of knowledge, but not all of it.

We people have never had a time to be content. We are always breaking free of ourselves and constantly falling into the depths of our God consciousness, and as a result we also see our incompetence.

I repeat: as a being of the world, man is an object that can be known. For example, in the theory of species man is understood as a special species; in the analysis of the gods, he is understood as subconscious and its role; in Marxism, he is seen as an animal formed through labor—through production, the animal that man can control nature and form into a society (both of which are formed in a supposedly perfect way). But all these ways of knowing are only the recognition of some parts of man, of some phenomena that actually occur, and by no means of the whole of man.

05 World

Man wants to understand what the world really is all about: in exploring this question, he does not consider any practical gains and losses. One of the deeper origins of science is pure, dedicated contemplation, which is a glimpse into the depths of the self, listening to the answers of the world.

Scientific knowledge is the method by which all the knowledge originally acquired is systematized into a whole, that is to say, scientific knowledge is the continuous condensation of many scattered and chaotic knowledge into principles that make them relate to each other.

The world picture should melt interconnected knowledge into one whole.

Every picture of the world is a fragment of the world: the world cannot be made up of a picture. The world is not an object, because we ourselves are always in the world; our object is in the world, but the world itself can never become an object.

The world is not closed. It cannot be explained from itself, it can only be explained by the things of the world, one after the other, and thus and the other, so that it is infinite. No one knows what boundaries future research will advance, and what cliffs will lie ahead of it.

06 History of Philosophy

Philosophy is as old as religion, and philosophy is older than all churches.

The church is open to the masses, and philosophy is only a matter for a few. The Church is the corporeal organization of power of the world's masses. But philosophy is the revelation of the kingdom of thinkers...

The independent development of thought took place in China, India, and the West. Although these three worlds have sometimes been connected, until the birth of Jesus, they were generally in a state of old and dead relations with each other, so we must understand these worlds separately. Buddhism in India, which came later, began to strongly influence China, while Christianity influenced the West.

Historically, Western philosophy can be divided into four continuous domains:

First, Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy traveled from myth to logos; it created the basic concepts of the West, the categories and basic positions of thought concerning existence, the world, and man as a whole.

Second, Christianity – medieval philosophy. Its journey is from biblical religion to intellectual understanding, from revelation to theology. Among some original thinkers, a unified world of religion and philosophy was born; these thinkers were mainly Paul, Augustine and Luther. In this vast field of thought, Christianity still retains its mystery to us.

Third, late European philosophy. Late European philosophy has arisen in tandem with modern natural science and the new emancipation of the individuality derived from authority. Kepler and Galileo are on one side, Bruno and Spinoza on the other; both represent new paths

Fourth, the Philosophy of German Idealism. Until the seventeenth century and later, the whole of Western thought remained untouched by antiquity, scripture, and Augustine. It was not until the eighteenth century that this phenomenon came to an end.

Epoch-making philosophers when pushing Kierkegur and Nietzsche. Philosophers of their type are diametrically different from the philosophers of their predecessors; they expose contemporary crises. Marx also far surpassed the philosophers in thought. In terms of mass influence, no one can match Marx.

These are the outlines of the examination of the entire history of philosophy. But this synopsis is superficial after all. We intend to go further and pursue its entire link. For example, the following questions are what we are going to explore:

First, the quest for the unity of the history of philosophy. This unity does not refer to a bunch of facts, but to ideas. What we seek is precisely this unity, but we can only obtain some special unity.

Second, the search for the beginning and its significance, but the absolute beginning cannot really be discovered.

Third, the search for the development and progress of philosophy. In the history of philosophy, a large number of philosophers are examined. For example, the development path from Socrates to Plato and Aristotle; from Kant to Hegel; and from Locke to Hume. But if anyone thinks that the later the philosophers are, the more they come to the fore, and that they not only retain in their hands the truth possessed by the previous philosophers, but also surpass them, then the above arrangement is wrong.

The history of philosophy is quite similar to the history of art. Because some of their most outstanding works are unique and unprecedented.

The history of philosophy has its own creative epoch. In every age, philosophy is the expression of the essence of man. Philosophy, like religion, has its own turf in every age.

For the history of philosophy, development is nothing more than an unimportant point of view. Because all great philosophies are perfect, all-encompassing, and self-reliant, they do not have to involve vast historical truths. But science takes a different path; the road of science is the back wave that urges the front wave, and the wave is higher than the wave. Philosophy, by its very nature, is the cause of the individual alone. It would be absurd, therefore, to think of philosophers as a step up the road to the development of philosophy.

Fourth, the search for level. The history of philosophy is not a hodgepodge of countless writings and thinkers, high and low.

...... The significance of philosophical activity lies in reality. We have only one reality, and that is the here and now.