The Philosophy of Recursive Thinking E-Book

Manfred Kopfer

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 97

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

If there is nothing you care for, then this book won't make a difference. For everyone else, it shows how we can escape postmodernist Nihilism and make reason great again.

Leseprobe

Manfred Kopfer

The Philosophy of Recursive Thinking

A way out of the dead end of postmodernist Nihilism.

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG80331 Munich

Content

Foreword

 

Chapter One: Philosophers and their philosophies

    Personal interests and intentions as motivation for engaging in philosophy

    The crux with terminologies and definitions

    Philosopher diseases

 

Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment

    Phenomenological limitations as an insuperable hurdle for objectivity

    Perhaps, language can help?

    Epistemology and metaphysics of the Counter-Enlightenment

 

Chapter Three: Collectivism

    The incredible blunder of collectivism

    Is it perhaps the other way around - collectivism being the necessary condition for civilizations?

    How about voluntary collectivism?

    Hegels naive collectivism

    Hegels ideology trap

 

Chapter Four: Postmodernism and Nihilism

    Time as a necessary determinant for the dialectic process

    Almost all assumptions of the Counter- Enlightenment are defensible

    Is the end then something like an "individualist Nihilism"?

    The end of philosophy and the end of thinking

 

Chapter Five: Recursivity

    What could be the next step?

    The connection to reality

    Philosophical thinking as thinking in paths into the past

    Every step into the past is a marginal one and every step has only one cause

    Reality is a discrete space

    Boring probabilities, simulated future realities and habitual feelings

    Always chose the best possible option

    Contradictory truths and realities

    The quality and quantity of truth in long path sequences

    The truth of sequences containing gaps

    Experienced paths and narrated paths

 

Chapter Six: Recursive solutions and recursive practice

    The pedestrian light situation and its recursive solution

    The recursive solution to Sisyphos problem

    The meta-level behind Sisyphos recursive solution

    Recursive science, research and development

    The evolutionary utility of religion

    Recursive collectivism

    Forging plans and failing with them

    The recursive meaning of life

 

Chapter Seven: Conclusion

    Recursive epistemology and metaphysics

    Final Thoughts

Foreword

I would like to begin my philosophical considerations with the last passage of Stephen Hicks book "Explaining Postmodernism", where Hicks made a call for the completion of the theoretic foundations of the Enlightenment to protect them from attacks by the Counter-Enlightenment.

On the following pages, I want to follow his call and show how the ideas of the Enlightenment can be renewed and how their foundational arguments can be secured in a manner, that they cannot be attacked any longer by Postmodernism.

The tools at my disposal to do so are limited. This both intellectually and philosophically since my knowledge about the discipline is only rudimentary. Especially the latter will surely lead to the reiteration of already existing thoughts and I can only assume that some of them have not proven to be robust in the storm of arguments against them and thus have been obsolete before me entering the debate. Nonetheless, I will try my best and offer a viable solution to the given problem.

This attempt for a solution is something I owe to myself and to my highly regarded culture, as well as to our common future. A nihilistic world, as it is forced upon us by Postmodernism is no place worth living in. Much more, such a world is not supposed to be worth living in. To such an outlook of this kind of bleak future accompanied and directed by a philosophical school of thought praising self-dissolution I cannot stay silent. My deepest will to live is resisting against that prospect and urges me for the sake of my own life and survival to do my best to prevent the looming self-destruction and to show a possible way out of this dead end ahead of us.

Chapter One: Philosophers and their philosophies

Thesis: The conclusions of the Counter-Enlightenment cannot and must not be rejected, but need to be accepted as a necessary step in the philosophical process, because thought through to their end, they will confirm the principles of the Enlightenment and make them unassailable.

Personal interests and intentions as motivation for engaging in philosophy

Stating ones own intentions at the beginning of a philosophical essay is not an anomaly to the discipline. You will barely find any philosopher - or non-philosopher - who has not defined his philosophical motivations which are usually of a political, social or theological nature. It is much more rather normal to find at the beginning of any system of philosophical axioms a subjective urge with a fixed set of intentions. Immanuel Kant intended to protect religion from the Enlightenment, Foucault had the same in mind with Marxism against Capitalism and it wasn't different with ancient philosophers in both Orient and Occident. They all thought about the implications of social developments and this with the intention to direct them in one way or another. They all had their intentions, and so I have mine.

This is the point where philosophy splits from the natural sciences and mathematics. In the latter, all theoretic models are bound to restrictions, which if ignored would only lead to the clear failing of every application based on the model. Irrespective the intentions of the creator, the consequences in these disciplines are narrowly limited.

For philosophical models on the other hand there are only a few exceptions in which such restrictions apply, since the theoretic models cannot be applied in a space with limited complexity. It is almost impossible to falsify them over time. Realistically, you can only make approximate statements about how a certain philosophical objective causes practical consequences.

Generally, there are three different types of categories for philosophical applications:

1. Philosophical models with a broad set of statements and a great reach, but with only a limited practical impact.

2. Very specific philosophical models with only a limited reach, but with significant practical results.

3. The model complexity is equal to the application complexity.

Yet, the category into which my thoughts will fall or whether there will be several results for different categories is not known. Perhaps there will be no result at all, a possibility I have to accept. In that case, my thoughts would confirm Postmodernism and its nihilistic implications for life.

The crux with terminologies and definitions

In the passage above, I deliberately used some terms to avoid others. Particularly, I used "practical results" instead of "reality". My decision to do so was primarily based on the fact that inherently to philosophy there is a struggle about terminology. Besides the inconsistency of definitions, possible connotations and the sketchiness of language, all terms as a whole must offer a consistent image of the presented world view. The less this is the case, the more opportunities there are to attack and the greater the loss of meaning behind the presented perspective is. One of the most controversial terms is "reality", which finds itself in the center of the struggle between the Modernists of the Enlightenment and Postmodernists of all colors. But there is almost no important term, which is not disputed and where there is no fight for the “correct” definition.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to avoid this problem, there will always be inconsistencies. Not only philosophers can be extremely vague in their expressions, Martin Heidegger was a notorious case, but for example translations are a pitfall for inaccuracies as well. I will try to either avoid sketchiness where I can, or I will point to it if there is no alternative. But in my case too, there can be no doubt that there is nothing that I could possibly describe accurately in its theoretic or practical nature.

With this evaluation, I am already deep inside the terrain of Postmodernism, since they base a good part of their theoretic foundations on the necessary vagueness of any expression. Nonetheless, I am confident - and I have to be - that I can limit the vagueness of my thoughts in regard of creating a bigger picture without having to confirm the postmodern set of conclusions as a whole. My confidence is based on the fact that this is supposed to be a criticism of the theoretic foundations of Postmodernism and I believe there are enough dominoes in their construct of ideas that can be brought down.

Philosopher diseases

Philosophers are not normal. You are normal, when you learn a craft or become a merchant and then you go and work for your money. When you are normal, you spend your spare time with practical hobbies, you spend time with your family and you lead a mainly social life. Philosophers are different. They don't live such a normal, social life, but they think about it. This inevitably leads to a separation between the philosopher and his subject - well, in most cases as there are always exceptions.

In a certain way, this separation is a necessary aspect, since engineers as well are never part of a device they have constructed. Besides planning, building and sometimes controlling it, the engineer stays an external variable to the closed entity of the device.

Too many philosophers derive their self-concept from this comparison. They see themselves as the engineers of human life and they are its planers, builders and controllers - but they are themselves never a part of this installation of social life. Perhaps the best example for such an attitude stems from Plato and his demand for a philosopher king as someone who manages the public good completely separated from the rest of society.

Besides the obvious and in the history of philosophy and by Plato himself debated weaknesses of such a system, there are plenty of practical examples where you can study the consequences of these weaknesses. For this reason, it is very important to note the discrepancy between practical life and theoretical abstraction. There is nothing you could possibly learn better about life than by living a social life in your community itself. This kind of contradiction is almost exclusive to philosophers. They abstract themselves - willingly or not - from the by far most important primary source of wisdom about their subject.

Despite that, philosophers demand to know more about life than the rest of us. Not just that, from this dichotomy they even derive their competence as decision-makers. Even though many philosophers know about this contradiction - after all, they get reminded about it often enough by non-philosophers - it is my impression that philosophers don't even bother to avoid this, or perhaps they cannot avoid this. They drift off on their own to retreat into their thinker niche, and it is only there where they can blossom out and articulate their deductions about life.

When reading Hicks book, there was a specific passage that caught my attention and I believe it contains the answer to why this is the case. There must be specific philosopher diseases and I mean this in a literal sense. To become a philosopher, you don't need to suffer from such a disease, but if you inevitably become a philosopher, you probably suffer from such a disease.