A note on historical perspective

As a student of philosophy in high school, I was often struck by the transience of the claims of all of the philosophers we studied. Each and every one of them made an attempt at what I considered the ultimate ambition of philosophy (by virtue of being attempted by all philosophers): the construction of a system that held true over all times and cultures, whose truth was inherent in this universe and not particular to their circumstances. And each and every one of them failed. Even if their views were accepted in their own time - by no means entirely common - they became outdated in time by shifting cultural emphases and values, as the culture they worked from (and thus the base assumptions and logic they worked from) was replaced. For example, Hobbes' logic of absolute monarchy, though seemingly axiomatic and rigorous, and Aristotle's arguments for slavery, though accepted for thousands of years, were made obsolete during the Enlightenment-era culture's shift towards republicanism and liberty. Because they worked from fixed cultural reference points, they ended up obsolete.

Were they 'right' nonetheless? In short, No (In long, No, you idiotic twat, of course not). Evidence has shown modern, free democracies to not only be more prosperous, happier, and more powerful, but even more stable than the despotic world powers (compare the USA, which, based on republicanism went from newly-freed colony to world hyperpower in 150 years or so and is still far and away the strongest country on Earth by any measure, and the USSR, an absolute despotism from 1924 onward, which rose to prominence very quickly but collapsed of its own accord after a mere 70 years). It seems clear that had Hobbes' or Aristotle's arguments prevailed, the world would be a worse place than it is now, and places that still follow their ideas are typically backwards and poor. That alone should be sufficient to consider their philosophies fatally flawed.

As a philosopher, I wish to escape this kind of trend - in theory, a good philosophy should ring true though time and cultures. In fact, my ambitions are even greater than that. I wish my philosophy to be truly universal, so that even cultures I have never heard of, alien cultures on distant planets, or even cultures living in a hyperbolic spatial environment, should be able to agree on its logic (given its premises). But already, cracks are appearing in my ambitions. First of all, to be truly universal, the philosophy must hold in cultures and environments I cannot begin to understand - and I of course cannot craft a philosophy that holds in a particular instance unless I know at least something, even the smallest thing, about that instance. Thus, I must restrict my philosophical ambitions to instances for which a series of axioms (which I will introduce in a later post) hold. Secondly, my ideas are already betraying signs of my culture and upbringing - bad news if I truly want to be universal. Because I come from a very self-conscious culture, my ambitions are patently self-conscious (the fact that I'm writing a post addressing this confirms that). Because I come from a capitalist republic (the good ol' US of A), my ideas are very individualistic, self-centered and libertarian. Because I come from a very left-wing area of said republic, my ideas on society end up being very common-good oriented (I will discuss the apparent contradiction here in a later post). And because I am a mathematics student in college, and the son of a mathematician, I tend to insist on axiomatic, rigorous logic in my attempt to be universal. Thus, by my very ambition to escape the mistakes of fixed cultural reference, I fail this ambition - a logical Catch-22 (see? another instance where my background influences my language and logic!).

So, we have already established that I have, by any reasonable measure, failed. But that's o.k. By aiming so high with my philosophy, I've made it so that even in failure, I might produce something not totally pointless. That's a good trick to know: if you aim high enough, even your failures might not be total shit. Or at least you can pretend they're not.