Where do you stand on major philosophical issues?

Eh why not! It's 23:23 and I've got some time to kill. Disclaimer: I'm just a 20-year-old undergrad and those views may or may not change in the future. I'll only answer the problems that are relevant to me obviously.

  • Existence of God: theism or atheism?

For most of high school until this year I used to be a big existentialist. Thus, I didn't feel I needed a God in my life and whether there was or wasn't one it didn't matter at all to me because the direct cause of my actions was my own self. Did I believe in a higher cause (in the principle of causality)? I don't remember exactly now but I think I did not. Today I'm a wannabe theist. Recently I've been putting myself back in Genealogy of Morals for a reading group I'm in, and I realized that I missed out completely on a major counter-argument for free-will: believing you have free-will is basically allowing yourself to put guilt on yourself everytime. I realized that for the most part of my life what my existentialist belief was doing was putting guilt over my head everytime I was unhappy with something in my life (especially when it came to issues related to dating). So for the past two weeks I'm questioning where should there be responsibility for the things that happen to me (who's fault basically; God? Spirits? Myself?). I'm also recently inclined to find an in-between in terms of free-will and determinism but I have yet to really have a good belief that stands. Studying Heidegger also sort of exposed me to the belief in fate, so yeah.

So to go back more explicitly to the question, I want to believe in God. I would like to be Christian but I just don't have any spirituality for it. I have no spiritual experience, and my dead grand-father is just dead to me, he doesn't exist anymore and all I have is just images in my head. I would like to believe in something spiritual but I don't feel anything. On this aspect it comes down to spirituality, and I have felt nothing so far about that. The rest of what religion brings (values, morals, basically the whole structure and social function that Nietzsche criticizes) I can find it without going to Church with philosophy and my education. As for God as a higher cause in the causality principle, I'm still not convinced everything has a same ultimate beginning but I'm not convinced either that everything comes down from another kind of everything that was there before.

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Both. I agree with Kant (and others) that there are things you can know without sensory experience (maths, emotions [although...], logic, thoughts, etc; the whole a posteriori). The thing is, what intrigates me (or worries me sometimes) is not so much how do I acquire knowledge but more what do I make of what I acquire. I'm not talking about the instrumentation of ideas (i.e: I know how to make the atomic bomb and then I make one). I'm talking about what happens once something reaches my awareness. To put it simply: phenomenology or perspectivism? Is my knowledge of the room an interpretation of what I am located in or is the room really out there as it is shown to my eyes? To me that question matters more than how do I become aware of things.

Logic: classical or non-classical?

I will hopefully get to elaborate on this later, but if there was one thing I would take side and fight for in philosophy, it's anti-logic. I'm all against sentential logic, logic, philosophy of language, etc (my flair says it all). I just can't conceive how someone could believe that our language should be structured even more, sliced from its subleties and artisticly curved ways of expression, how making things simpler in language would make us better or more efficient. To me Russell and Wittgenstein are preaching an ideal that is as idealistic as the Christian ideals of the 19th century, and even more fictional than that.

I will probably make a lot of eyes roll and I'm sorry. I'm just against analytic philosophy, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Basically, I'm against Deductive Logic 214 and beyond. I'm aware you can do a lot of things in this field (thanks Science and Physics) but it's just not my cup of tea and of all the options I have (communism, democracy, socialism, liberalism, abortion, pro-life, Trump or Hillary, etc), I'd rather not give a fuck about all those and despise analytic philosophy. Sorry. Is it a wise and mature position? I don't know, it's just how I feel.

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Non-physicalism. The mind will be physical the day you can tell me how big it is and you can pull a thought out of my head and throw it on a glass window.

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Arghhh I wish I already took an intro to ethics class (I haven't yet). I seriously need something or someone to convince me that justice actually exists. So far my life experience and my observation of the world (i.e: death, wwii, etc) make me believe that fairness does not exist, it's all a matter of perspective (and sometimes power). Obviously there are ways to make choices (utilitarianism for instance) but there is no true fairness, no true justice. To me Ethics is just a way of living your life. It's a field of decision making that relies only on perspective and sense of value (valuing which perspective satisfies the most).

If you were to tell me this is an immature view on ethics I would believe you. All I have is a ressentiment towards it that comes from life experiences. To be honest I think I know what could make me change my view but that will never happen. Some things I want that I believe is unfair for me to not have will never happen.

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

Ohhh I love this! We're getting closer to my field of interest! (Which is Metaphysics.) Well... I don't know lol. I think it's a little bit of all, but if I were to believe in Heidegger's view on Technology I would say that personal identity will become less and less biological because of the possibility of getting plastic surgery, which is something decided through your mind thus psychologically or intellectually influenced.

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

My view on politics has often surprised people at my department. I hate politics. That's it. I'm not political at all and everytime I vote I vote for the previous government in power as long as there is nothing they've done that impacted me directly. I hate change for the sake of change (hence why I hate student politics). I hate politics because it's just sophistry. It's a matter of who can convince the best. It's Nietzsche's reactive force at its best and I'm all against that. I want a decision-making environment in which everybody agrees. Disagreements don't reflect at all nature in my opinion, and I think the idea of disagreeing is a way of getting at the core of what being human is (along with Aristotle's point that we desire knowledge). I want everybody to agree. I guess you could say I'm for a dictatorship... the hypocrisy is I would only be down for a dictatorship in which my views are the dominant ones. And that's why I'm not into politics.

I just think it's an absurd construct. It's absurd that Socrates had to die in order to prove his point that politics just don't work. I have to think further on this, but I suspect it's because of politics itself that we have social problems and not because of the ideas themselves that explain these problems. I suspect racism doesn't come out of the blue like that, but it's there because of politics, because there is a place where you can go to decide what the others can do.

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

One of today's problem in philosophy is our lack of warning for scientisism. Heidegger's idea of the Enframing calling upon us to reveal things as standing reserve wouldn't be so good if we were more aware of scientisim and the overall excessive trust given in STEM fields. Science is great, but too many times people forget that it has its problems that only we can solve with philosophy (and I want to believe Metaphysics can to!). I remember watching this great lecture given by a French philosopher on Youtube about Schopenhauer and he went on about the fact that science rests on sand. It's just another conceptual model of knowledge that serves the same purpose religion did up to 150 years ago.

I think there's also a real issue with technology and Heidegger raises it brillantly. Where are we going with this? What is really the essence of technology, this Aristotelian thinghood (substance) from which computers and cars come from? It seems Heidegger had an accurate view about the shifting in our ways of making things and nobody seems to wonder about it (except the famous "oh we're all heads down on our phones it shapes our social interactions!!!"). We need further investigations than just the instrumentalization of technological pieces and sociological points of views. Especially considering how technology is now applied on nature with this whole pro-environment trend going on. It seems we were massively challenging nature to produce things in abundance, and now we're massively using it to produce things in abundance (i.e: challenging the ground to extract oil vs. now using the sun all the time to make electricity). We need more investigation on this on our part.

/r/askphilosophy Thread