We go from one extreme to the other. Materialism vs idealism, egoism vs altruism, hedonism vs asceticism, nihilism vs moralism… The dichotomy is caused by our way of learning and the nature of language. We learn through certain definitions and the words are not best things to certainly know. Because of the words we think we can know the world for certain. That is not possible.
Science, the method of observing and measuring the nature works great for nature and objects; yet it fails to come up with solutions to humans maybe because the subject cannot be the object of itself. The eye cannot see itself, the teeth cannot bite itself. Not only the object issue but also the perspective, human framework in it is the problem. That’s why we have humanities and still the world cannot appeal to scientific method in most of the matters.
One of the things that scientific method and natural sciences are not able to solve is the meaning and the goal of life. We have a short answer with an analogy for this. Life cannot be understood, because it’s created “now”. The meaning always addresses to the past, you cannot find meaning for all times, it’s a bit linguistic and epistemological than being an ontologial deal.
Just like the language and words, we create meaning, “we” do it. It’s more of an axiomatic universe, than a deterministic one. Albeit it can be determined that the make-believe, the sandbox nature will be the goal. Let’s take a word to understand it better. A word is only meaningful through the convention. Wittgenstein has put it very clearly in his second phase(Philosopical Investigations) that search for certain meanings is futile because it’s more likely to be a game than being an engineering piece. When you use a word you’re playing a language game, it’s meaningful among the people that play the game. And you’re educated to play this game from the infancy.
Does a game exist? Does it have a reality? Yes for both of them but it’s dynamic and it’s a sandbox play. Wittgenstein started to play after a while, he got it when he stopped being an engineer when it comes to humans. Humans are ideal beings, it’s not as observable as nature, you need to play and create, craft human life.
Natural sciences and scientific method was a product of the ideal study called philosophy. There is a mystic, untold, ideal side to philosophy. We can’t ignore it. The hypothesis, the assumption of discovery, the goal and the purposes of science along with values of scientists makes it a bit humanities together with natural sciences.
What’s wrong with applying scientific method back to philosophy? It’s not wrong, it’s the best way possible. Yet there are unscientific sides of humans. We say stop because it’s been too much in the academic circles. Analytic tradition which is mainstream of the departments today, finds nothing worthy of attention in the history of philosophy. They think we made it all up, useless chatter. Dead wrong, these were human ideals, projections for future, the creation, the following of the sandbox. The most valuable on the contrary.
It’s now too much, pulled to the scientific philosophy side. Let’s pull it to the other side. Start playing the sandbox, stop a while on the analysis of the area.
