Fatal Errors of today’s prevalent Philosophies

There are many things people take for granted when it comes to philosophy. Most, and perhaps even many of my readers, would agree that philosophy is not a subject in which things can be taken as absolutes. Indeed, many philosophers attempt to make philosophy seem like an unfathomable subject (whether they do it on purpose and what that purpose is I don’t know). Take Kant for example. He suggested the existence of two worlds: one which we perceive, which seems logical and can be subjected to man’s will to some extent; the other is the real world, the one a man cannot perceive (and then goes on to explain what that world is like… so go figure).

A vast majority of these philosophies agrees on several points which are essentially incorrect. I probably can’t cover them all in one post, but I eventually will, as I will most likely be adding some more on the list. I won’t go in any particular order either and the reason is that each of my rebuttals can be understood without the rest. For this reason, as well as the fact that this is a mere rebuttal, I’m urging my readers to refer to some other literature for a consistent philosophy, mainly the books written by Ayn Rand. As I’m not trying to build a consistent philosophy, but rather dismiss something that is widely accepted, I don’t expect everyone will understand what I mean, so I repeat that for a structured argument for (as opposed to against) the ideas I hold as I’m writing this post, these readers will have to read something else for clarification.

The way I’m going to do this is that, at the beginning of each rebuttal, I will write the sentence in bold, which is widely accepted, and in the following paragraphs I will try to explain why this is wrong, trying at the same time that my rebuttal is as common sense as I can. This may not always be true, which is why I refer my readers to the abovementioned literature. Now follow the rebuttals.

Morality is relative. There are reasons why something like this has even become widely accepted. First of all, it is important to ask “What is morality?” Many people I know mix into the definition the belief in god with no mistake; then there’s some who mention something about being nice to people, about loving thy neighbor, then they say “do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, etc. End result: the definition is everything, except consistent. The essential, discriminating characteristic of morality is missing from their definition. When a person doesn’t know what something is, yet he knows it exists somewhere, he is more likely to accept anything he is told about it. Thus, when one hears that morality is relative, he accepts it and even embraces it because formulated thus, it gives him the impression that he is absolved of the responsibility of ever attempting to find out what it in fact is – it’s relative, so it can’t really be defined, right? Wrong!

Morality is a very down-to-earth thing. It is a kind of your personal realization that you are a rational and volitional living being and that as such, you need to live by certain principles. I’m aware that I’ve mentioned several things which aren’t widely accepted today, such as volition. Many argue it doesn’t exist because it seems to violate laws of nature. At this point it is enough to say that for all our practical purposes, volition is very real. For a full rebuttal of that, read one of my further installments, or some of the suggested literature. Putting this aside for now, if you look at the above definition, you will see that the principles which you need to live by are not defined very clearly. So, one might say that morality is indeed relative, because it depends on what kind of principles you choose. However, principles are fundamental truths about life and its requirements, about man, etc. and not some arbitrary guidelines. In general, one cannot consistently practice an arbitrary guideline for a prolonged period of time; something will eventually come in the way. However, adhering to something fundamental, such as productivity, is always possible.

There are no absolutes.  This is somewhat of a corollary of the above. The quickest way to prove this is wrong is by simply writing it out. The sentence says “There are no absolutes”, yet it is an absolute itself. It is some kind of a paradox when you think about it; let’s assume that everything else is indeed relative, as the sentence suggests. In this case, the sentence is incorrect because in that case there is exactly one absolute, and that is the sentence itself. But if it is true that the sentence is incorrect, then there indeed aren’t any absolutes, so the sentence is true. This is a contradiction, and the sentence is a paradox.

There are absolutes indeed and I’ll give three very simple examples: First of all, reality exists. That is one absolute. Another is that all things that exist have identity; they are something and they behave in a certain way. The last of the three I’ll give is that consciousness is able to perceive things as they are, i.e. figure out their identity. Many corollaries spring out from these basic absolute truths. These are, in fact, axioms of Objectivist metaphysics. Axioms are very small basic truths which can be used to get to other fundamental truths; they cannot be proven, and every attempt to deny them begins by first (unconsciously)accepting them.

Man can’t perceive reality objectively. This is incorrect. This claim comes in two variants, both attempting to destroy the same thing – man’s conviction that what he perceives is a correct representation of the real world. The first variant attempts to invalidate the senses themselves, by claiming that our senses distort reality. It is true that to some extent every lense (such as one in the eye) distorts the light that passes through it, as well as that there is a lot of approximation in turning something like warmth or cold of an object into electrical signals that travel through your nerves. However, the very fact that we are here, alive and well, dismisses this attack on our senses as faulty. You have used your senses many times in your life in order to get through hardships; you use your senses when you drive a car, which could be very dangerous if your eyes were somehow damaged and/or dysfunctional. The fact that you’re still here, despite everything, proves the validity of your senses well enough. If you also think that evolution is really how we came to be, then you might also be interested to know that our senses evolved through millenia, becoming ever finer, and presenting reality to living beings in greater detail by the generation, while the dysfunctional individuals died. We survived, therefore our senses worked.

The other variant attacks perception, claiming that even if our senses are valid, our mind interprets the data our senses send to it faultily, and often dismisses a lot of it. To counter this claim, I provide the above arguments all over again. We are still here. It is only apt to add that our mind – which is in fact us – filters out that which is irrelevant. If it ignored a speeding car that’s moving toward you on a regular basis, you wouldn’t be alive very long; in fact, it is doubtful if mankind would even have cars.

Thus, our senses work, i.e. they make a good representation of reality, and we perceive all that is relevant to us. One of my colleagues mentioned the experiment with cats, where several cats were placed in a room with vertical lines, and some were placed in a room with horizontal lines. After some time, they were each placed in opposite environments, and then cats which had been grown in a room with vertical lines couldn’t correctly interpret objects that were placed horizontally, and vice versa. This was his argument for the claim that our perception is faulty. I responded that these cats were raised in conditions which aren’t normal, and therefore, they could not have developed the necessary abilities to grasp horizontal or vertical objects. The cats have developed only the abilities they needed to survive in their environment. If that environment is not real, i.e. it is a setup, then that is the kind of environment the cat’s brain adapted to and it could correctly interpret everything within that environment. Placing it in a new environment could make some smarter cat realize that the skills it learned earlier aren’t enough, and that if it was to survive in this new environment, it must start giving significance of other kinds of objects too – be they horizontal or vertical. Same is with men – if something new manifested itself in our environment, which could greatly affect our lives, and which we couldn’t see until now or considered it irrelevant, it would be irresponsible of us not to act on it, embrace it, and study it. Consider finding out the benefits of oil; before that realization humans treated it as waste; afterwards we started looking for it.

(To be continued…)