The Limits of Philosophy

 

What is Philosophy?

 

Philosophy consists of human answers to the great questions of life, such as Who am I? Where have I come from? Is there any meaning to life? What happens after death? And so on.

But as it is presently defined and taught in the West, philosophy is the answers to all these questions without God, or without 'revelation' from God. 

 

There is no good reason under heaven why it needs to be defined this way, but it is: find answers to the great questions of life and death using the human mind alone, without introducing God or anything or anyone supernatural.

So the philosopher sits down without a Bible (or any 'holy book' for that matter) and ponders a subject: war, marriage, and so on, using whatever tools are around her (history, culture, writers, human reason).

Here are five immediate limitations she comes up against:

Limit #1: Experience is a limited guide 

 
One tool she will use is Experience: she will draw on her own past and present experience. Trouble is that being finite and located in only one family, one culture, one nation and one short span in history, her experience will be miniscule. Any philosophy based upon it will inevitably be open to revision and change in the light of a broader experience.

Limit #2: What 'is' may not be what 'should be'

 
Another source of philosophical wisdom would be the way we find things around us in the world. If you were born into a culture that glorified violence (the Roman world, for example) or tolerated slavery or tolerated abortion, you could easily grow up assuming these "ares" were "rights" (plenty of mothers, yes mothers, fought against the eradication of chimney sweeps, a cruel occupation for a child if ever there was one. Why, because that's just the way things "were" growing up in that age).

 

If a person feels attracted to someone else of the same sex, as another example, one might easily say that this 'what is' is 'what should be.'

 

But who is to say that one can so easily move from 'what is' to 'what should be' ? There may be a world of difference  between what we find around us in the world or feel in our hearts and what is actually true and right: 'is' is no necessary guide to 'should be'. 

 

What if something has gone wrong with the world which means that what 'is' is a distortion of what 'should be'? Without revelation, how would a philosopher know that what 'is' is not "right"?

Limit #3: The experts may be wrong

 
Suppose we go to the experts to inform our philosophy. They could also so easily be wrong. Few experiences are more amusing than reading an ancient philosopher describe the natural world! New textbooks are written every year to correct old information. What the experts say in one decade is overturned in the next. Sometimes, as in the case of Marx and Mao, not before considerable carnage has been done to and by the followers of false systems.

Limit #4:  The balance of truth

 

What if within our age or particular culture (or just within us personally!) there is a big imbalance of perspective? In "The Master and his Emissary" author Iain Mcgilchrist suggests that present Western culture, unlike Eastern cultures, is dominated by left-hemisphere brain function, with potentially dire consequences for the future. 

 

What if there are other imbalances which we simply do not see, all of them skewing our philosophy away from the truth?

Limit #5: There may be things unknowable by human research

 
Suppose there are keys or key pieces of information that simply cannot be known without 'revelation'? Suppose there are secrets which only the Creator can reveal to us, information which simply can't be found by us, no matter how big the research programme? Any philosophy which did not take them into account would then prove faulty.

For all these reasons philosophy has severe limitations. 

The overarching reason all human-without-God philosophy is flawed is this:  the people who create it are tiny and finite and in the Great Scheme of Things, they simply don't know that much at all: none of us do, that's why we need Revelation.

Philosophy is like a bridge that gets us a tiny distance to the land of truth. But we need revelation to get to the other side - not attached to the partial bridge of philosophy, but making the whole span.  

 

If we walk over the philosophy bridge thinking it will lead us to truth, we'll end up stumbling into the river of error.

 

AI Image above:

"Dalle, paint a wise man thinking in the style of digital art."