It has been said before, like most of what we believe.
The door with the sign "Knowledge Conundrum" doesn't open.
Behind the door is the answer.
Would we understand the revealed answer?
To what?
Is that the conundrum?
It has always been.
That may be why Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus (and all those who
remained and will remain unknown, for being is beyond knowledgr) never wrote
anything.
Then, why did they teach?
Maybe to reveal the path or the goal: not both.
The remainder would enlighten the enlightened through personal effort.
The mystery is more powerful than the unknown we may seek.
Pandora's vase was forbidden to the unenlightened mortals.
But we opened it before we could understand.
Thus hidden knowledge emerged as evil, because we were not ready for it .
Only hope was left inside.
Eve plucked an apple from the forbidden tree of knowledge, before she could
understand.
Thus dark knowledge of discording opinions brought streif and destruction.
We want faith and reason together, but reason must first learn to believe; and
faith needs to reason.
Alone, faith or reason are sterile.
When humans believe in something, they can advance toward it together, not
against each othe, as in our societyr.
But how?
When we "know" something, we end up arguing and struggling,
ultimately against each other.
It mostly starts with philosophizing.
Philosophy is articulated love and search for knowledge.
Philosophy education needs history, not just description.
Description often tends to be merely opinion.
Known Greek and Western philosophy started with Thales of Miletus' (625?-547? B.
c.).
He taught that everything came from water.
Fascinating enough to opine that he had the cosmologic answers.
But then came Anaximander (ca. 610-547 b. c.), of the same Greek Miletus school,
developer of the "Apeiron" concept, as a sophisticated initial combination of
thermal, material, atmospheric , quasi energy, time, and astronomic factors.
This converts the belief in Thales' philosophy into Anaximander's
That began a continuous series of "final" convictions (or "theories") in which
the last generally wins against the previous.
Thus new philosophers kept coming up, and successively overriding each other for
thousands of years until now, and will go on.
Once accustomed to these continuous conversions from one theory to the
subsequent, we become reluctant to accept any idea or doctrine as final.
We learn that everything changes, even change itself (which is one of our
present problems).
The opposite happens with religions, which normally purport to give us an
"eternal truth", because the god we like to believe in gives us the answers that
settle everything once and for ever.
We expect no less from a god.
Then, people get confused.
They expect a philosophy (or its equivalent in sociology, politics, psychology,
economics, pedagogy, epistemology, morality, civilization and so on) to be as
reliably permanent as an immutable religion.
People fight, die, kill, destroy entire populations and nations for it.
Also if "Love" is "it".
This proves by itself that what we believe may be not worth unshakeable faith,
now or ever.
We forget that philosophy itself faces a continuous flow of changes.
Reason is expected to create philosophy and all theories.
But reason itself wants to dwell and remain on the chosen system and makes a
religion out of it, even if it doesn't intend to.
The French Revolution (ca.1789-179.9.. A.D.) tried to substitute religion with
"Goddess Reason", and failed miserably.
Take democracy, socialism and Islamism (=politicized Islam).
They are handled by their believers like religions worth killing and dying for.
And dying and killing goes on, still now.
If we have any wisdom left (what happened to it?), we just relegate it to the
roles of merely intellectual disputes searching for a solution that will create
more disputes.
Without end.
About 200 years ago, Hegel (1770-1831) described historical cycles as consisting
of "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis". Thesis proposed, antithesis countered a
balancing opposition, and synthesis... synthesized both...
Then the synthesis would become the new thesis of a new cycle, and so on.
The average man doesn't have the intellectual and moral strength or interest for
it.
Knowledge and Truth may be such that only a sufficiently developed elite could
understand them.
That is a virtually dogmatic taboo in a democratic society.
Pythagoras (ca. 580-500 B.C.) created a school where his teachings (mainly about
mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, with some unavoidable "magic") were
protected by secrecy, to protect them from contaminating popularization.
Elitism, Indian and other castes were created to protect the knowledge and power of more
refined people from others on lower educational and social levels.
Islam, India, China and other oriental societies believe that their
social stratification systems between democracy, socialism, capitalism and patriarchy
are better in principle and practice.
Buddha introduced a behavioral system that educated the body and then the mind
into a step-by-step fusion of life and cosmos tending to reach a point
where living and dying would make no difference and convergee into each other and become one with the universe.
Modern physics seems to reach toward that point with the second principle of
thermodynamics, which indirectly suggests that the universe tends toward chaos.
The word "chaos" has a terrifying meaning, but the concept can be eminently
relaxing and fascinating:
Accordingly, every physical process in the Universe has an irreversible loss of
energy, defined in the "entropy" concept, elaborated in the second principle of
thermodynamics, as said above.
This -properly understood- explains the tendency toward chaos: a sort of
universal and relaxing "settling" into a motionless zero that takes billions
(and billions, God only knows...) of years. /
Life is only the apparently the opposite: it (de)composes order in the opposite direction from
chaos.
Sinple, ain't it?
But life is the infinitesimal exception in the lifeless universe.
Thus, atoms, rocks, stars and carcasses are more realistic than anything alive.
Since also life ends in chaos (or tranquil death and beyond), one could state that life
is normally an anti-normal abnormality.
Nonsense?
Why must it make any "sense" that can be comprehended by our relatively limited inteligence?
Since we are only an anomaly in the universe, at least as long as we live, why
worry about knowledge, virtue, good and evil, or life and death?
Because of reason.
Reason is so abnormal, that, in human psychological terms, it could induce
humans to go to a rock for psychological tests or psychoanalytical therapy
(humans see a difference between the two that rocks would not even consider).
Crazy?
Not if we use the appropriate logical premises and logical consequences.
Logic was tried in the service of justice.
The trouble started with defining justice.
Its very definition was faulty, because no one has ever been able to show a
consistent system of justice in practice, let alone as a concept.
Justice is like God: we falsely believe we can define or "deny".
We know, now, that we have neither knowledge, nor definable and logically
enforceable justice, rights and laws.
Some self-confident experts (not philosophically, but in reality, in spite of
their frequent humility and refined learning) announce they can.
In practice, however, there are no courts of justice: only courts of law.
Nor permanently-just rights and laws.
Therefore, we make laws to correct laws to correct laws to correct laws.
And to correct democracy, and to correct dictatorship.
Anything man does needs corrections sooner or later. Including our embalmed Bill
of Rights and Constitution.
Religions have fallen into the same trap: update, fail, update...
And we fight, go to war, kill and get killed for "justice" and its presumptuous
rights and laws.
Whether we win or lose, the short -or long- range results might be disastrous
for all involved.
The tree of knowledge (closely or remotely resembling the above) should have been left alone before an introductory
evolution that we should seek with the humble recognition that we cannot have it
immediately, just because we want it NOW.
Back to square one?
We have no choice; but it is futile if we don't relearn from scratch.
We could go back to Plato's (428-347 b. c.) academic style, deliberately remote
from practice, and a subsequent method of translating something into practice,
only after finding and using a foolproof testing method.
That is where the wise and futile seem to meet in glorious insignificance,
merely because we don't pay attention to what deserves our focus.
For time immemorial, the unchallenged coexistence of the Chinese "yin" (female
-or male, if you prefer- or passive, evil, or wet, cold, dark...) and "Yang"
(all Yin's opposite attributes) seems to have offered an existentialistic or
ontological formula to satisfy most intellectual and emotional tastes.
That coexistence may be harmonious or not, but it must be there.
The trouble (or vantage) was -and is- that it requires no priests, bureaucrats,
pundits, politicians, monarchs, highfalutin authorities, temples, titles, no sin
and virtue, reward and punishment with their hierarchies and impressive pomp.
Furthermore, as I wrote in other essays, sin, in religion (and in law); is like
the zero in mathematics: it makes its operation possible.
In this scenario,
woman was born complete as a Mother Nature life source
and nurturer.
Male man seeds life and tries to direct its traffic.
080116
J.J.P.C.
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