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Heresy and Philosophy, Part II.

II

Philosophy

A large number of people who declare themselves to be believers treat philosophy and the worldview theories based on it as a disastrous science. After all, the Scriptures warn against philosophy that tries to replace the theonomic Logos with words that describe the plurality ( logoi ) of the elemental world. The result of an overly radical interpretation of the apostolic exhortations is the relationship between the “enlightened” priest and the parishioner ( parishioner means: ignorant, dark man). However, this is not a Scriptural account.

Apart from philosophies that lead a man away from a certain mystical whole, there is also a philosophy that directs man towards transcendence. Philosophy is the love of wisdom. At the time when it was beginning to take shape as a field of culture, wisdom had no definition linking it either with the reason of rationalism or with reason functioning solely under the inspiration of a higher force.

Wisdom meant the practical ability to apply knowledge of the world, gods and man in a good life. Depending on the emphasis on any of these factors, philosophy as a proposal for a wise life could both obscure and reveal transcendence.

Most often, philosophy proposed a balanced solution and a golden ratio in the application of judgments and practical advice. Its subtlety consisted in the fact that, as a rule, it did not try to replace the role of religious worship, avoided final decisions and avoided – with a few exceptions – from acting as a depositor of arts and natural sciences, despite the fact that the latter have their roots in the philosophical search for arche . There would be no modern science if it were not for philosophy.

It is assumed that in proto-Christian times the main branches of philosophy were Platonism on the one hand and Aristotelianism on the other. Platonism and Neoplatonism defended the legitimacy of the World of Ideas, which became the theoretical building blocks of later Christian metaphysics. The Aristotelian current, which concentrated on the natural world, was forgotten due to the expansion of Christian thought and was reborn in the Middle Ages.

The Renaissance in the following centuries led to the emancipation of human reason as the center of thought. As a result, a philosophy based on a theocentric vision of the world was transformed towards an anthropocentric order, where transcendence was slowly gaining the status of immanence, and rational thought moved towards atheism. The theological effect of the currents of thought was the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and in the field of everyday practice – a dissonance of mind and heart.

The further development of logic, mathematics and the philosophy of nature led to the separation of the natural sciences from philosophy. The scientific and technical revolution divided philosophy into one oriented around the issues related to the facts of the world and into an idealistic philosophy. The former was absorbed by liberated and independent science, while the latter ended its life with the Nietzschean coup during which the god of the philosophers died as a logical error of thought projecting images as reality. The hitherto role of philosophy has lost its relevance.

The experience of the fall of mankind during the First and Second World Wars brought the entire legacy of the Enlightenment to a tribunal of the existential decision on the nature of man. The episode of nihilism and the deconstruction of the existing ideas about the world led to the exhaustion of the paradigm of philosophy as the path of harmonious existence. The result of such doubts is the growing susceptibility of those who seek answers to the question about the meaning of human life to too radical suggestions.

The first radical proposition is contemporary atheistic rationalism, which has little to do with rationality, because it proposes reason reduced to an irrational idealized structure of thought closed between its verifiability and falsifiability based on calculative, instrumental empiricism. It is a scientific thought, but not a scientific one, because it posits science as a worldview and not a tool for knowing material reality.

The second radical proposition advocates the rejection of rationality as embroiled in the deceptive teachings that led to the hecatomb of World War II, to the rationalization of death in extermination camps. Irrationalist searches, an episode with the new age and various parare-religious ideologies have also penetrated Christian thought, as a result of which theology and philosophy were in many environments considered deceptive prudence, the teachings of which would nevertheless be turned into the stupidity of this world.

Let us pass over the first mode of existential thinking as it does not fit in with the holistic vision of an individual possessing his irreducible dignity. Scientists, who achieve everything that reason can achieve in their respective times, recognize the undecidable not only temporary, but final in the question of human identity. Mediocre people idealize the scientific goal they pursue.

The second answer is based on the negation of the first proposition. Rationalism as an ideology of a distorted, reduced ratio has not worked. It should therefore be rejected. Rightly so, but to deny the error does not automatically mean to discover the truth. By rejecting a proposal, we will not come to a better understanding of reality as a result of the creation of an opposition. The mind is a tool that serves man in cognition. What is not this tool is supra-rational – but not ir rational.

Reason leads man to a better discernment in the spiritual reality, because the cognitive perception of the material world shows its richness and diversity, constituting the “image and likeness” of the spiritual reality. Rational control over bodily affects, including emotional and lower feelings, helps to better shape higher feelings.

The mind through the world leads above the world and above itself. Wisdom consists in using the rational potential in such a way as not to reduce life to it as a tool, and at the same time not to deny the legitimacy of using this tool in order to act in a more harmonious way. To love wisdom understood in this way is just philosophy .

Philosophy, if it is a true philosophy and not an ideology (bad science), avoids reducing and establishing equivalents of religion, faith, art, science. It is such a way of using concepts related to earthly matters and such a form of resolving ethical problems or organizing human knowledge, thanks to which a person will understand in a deeper way the idea of ​​a higher power in relation to nature and man, and avoid contaminating his mystical experience with misappropriated information. Moreover, philosophy, as a good science, trains reason and allows it to be better used both in one’s own spiritual discernment, in the interpretation of Scripture, and in relying more effectively on deceptive teachings.

To reject philosophy as a reflection on the effective use of a given human mind means the negation of the possibility of showing what exceeds human rationality, what is within it, and what is the result of a mental error. In other words, to reject philosophy as leading to what transcends this reason is simply to reject the Word .



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