 124. Philosophy � Greek |
The usual, contracted, verbal man is always asking questions, trying to find a way to be comfortable in the chair of the body. His reveries are all so correct, punctuated with symbols that gesture at great matters. But he cannot rise or fall. He is frozen in the dream of certainties, the mysticism of a rationality that excludes what is above and below the thinking mind.
The usual man seeks control by all means, since he fears that he and even existence itself are out of control. He makes sublime sighs whenever he sees something orderly. But he does not understand that all order is an arbitrary design, made of repetitions of like things.
Order is Truth to Narcissus. He dies for the sake of order. He dies because of order. He is self-possessed, possessed of the duplication or repetition of everything he wants to continue to be. He repeats himself, literally. He is fixed upon himself, the symbol of certainty. At last, unable to yield to what is more than self, below thought, above thought, outside the thinker, he contracts upon himself, imploded on that instant of thinking.
-Franklin Jones
The Limited Man-Made Philosophical Schools and Theories
Since the days of the early Greeks, philosophers have been divided into different schools and have advanced opposing theories. Among the many basic outlooks and theories are the following:
- altruism = the principle of living and acting in the interest of others rather than for oneself.
- analytical philosophy = (Modern Philosophy).
- asceticism = the belief that withdrawl from the physical world into the inner world of the spirit is the highest good attainable.
- atomism = the belief that the entire universe is ultimately composed of interchangeable indivisible units.
- critical theory = a philosophical version of Marxism associated with the Frankfurt School (founded 1921).
- criticism = the theory that the path to knowledge lies midway between dogmatism and skepticism.
- determinism = the belief that the universe and everything in it (including individual lives) follows a fixed or pre-determined pattern. This belief has often been used to deny free will.
- dialectical materialism = the theory - often attributed to Marx - that reality is strictly material and is based on an economic struggle between opposing forces, with occasional interludes of harmony.
- dogmatism = the assertion of a belief without arguments in its support.
- dualism = the belief that the world consists of two radically independent and absolute elements, e.g. good and evil, or (especially) spirit and matter.
- egoism = the belief that the serving of one's own interests is the highest end.
- empiricism = the doctrine that there is no knowledge except that which is derived from experience.
- existentialism = the doctrine that the human self and human values are fictions, but inevitable ones, and that is bad faith to deny one's own free will, even in a deterministic universe.
- fatalism = the doctrine that what will happen will happen and nothing we do will make any difference.
- hedonism = the doctrine that pleasure is the highest good.
- humanism = any system that regards human interests and the human mind as paramount in the universe.
- idealism = any system that regards thought or the idea as the basis either of knowledge or existence.
- interactionism = the theory that physical events can cause mental events, and vice versa.
- materialism = the doctrine that asserts the existence of only one substance - matter - thus denying the existence of spirit.
- monism = a belief in only one ultimate reality, whatever its nature.
