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Dizon, Michael Christian G.Synthesis Paper061192

Ph110

In Defense of Context: Philosophy as Positive Uncertainty

Defining the terms. This is perhaps the most important first step in any

human discourse and yet, this is usually the first thing that we take for

granted. We take it for granted not because it is not important, but because

we have a shared assumption that we know what we are talking about, that

we are able to talk about it. Perhaps this is the way we should start talking

about philosophy.

When we ask the question “what is philosophy?” we are dealing with

the assumption that we are talking about something that exists, to even be

able to be talked about. One might bring up the topic of pink unicorns as a

quick and peremptory rebuttal to this assertion, but one can contend that we

can talk about pink unicorns, and therefore have a conception of what a

unicorn that is pink is. It is helpful to think first and foremost of philosophy as

just that: a conception. This is partly because a conception can be anything

at all, not bound to any strict definition at the outset, even if it will accrue

meaning of its own, on its own. If there is one thing that is impressed

explicitly on a fledgling philosophical mind, it is the danger of boxing

philosophy into definitions, because no single definition will be able to

capture what philosophy is in its entirety; thus, our reliance on conceptions

of philosophy.

The use of the plural “conceptions” is a conscious decision in as far as

there is an incontrovertible plurality of possible philosophies. The history of

philosophy can attest to this fact. In such a history we can see broad

movements and systems of thought as much as we can see the minutiae

that comprise them. The importance of a historical overview of philosophy

lies not so much on the piecemeal understanding of particular thinkers, but



rather more on the contexts that these philosophers belonged to, the times

that they moved in, and the particular problems presented to them. In a way

we can say that all philosophy is born of a particular set of circumstances

impressed upon a particular thinker, who then manufactures a philosophy

that he/she might suppose is the best possible interpretation of the times.

One trained in philosophical inquiry might immediately point one’s

attention to a glaring (and very important) problem with the statement

above. It seems to be saying that all of philosophy is, as it were, a “product

of its time”. The difficulty with this is that if one follows that line of thinking,

then a particular philosophy loses its relevance (by which I mean the reason

why it is still being talked about) and meaning (by which I mean the unique

way and sense in which it interprets the world) outside of its own context: for

example, strictly speaking there is no sense in talking about an Aristotelian

physics, because recent developments in the field of science have proven

Aristotle’s conception of the laws that govern nature to be outdated, or even

absurd. On the one hand it seems reasonable to junk Aristotle’s physics

entirely (if one were of a rigidly scientific bent), because we children of the

twentieth century already know that the air does not somehow push along

an object that had been thrown to act as its motive force when it has left the

hand of its initial mover (the thrower). On the other hand, and here lies the

importance of the historical view of philosophy, learning about this particular

understanding of physics from the olden times enabled one to view it

critically, and thus in the first place discover that there is something amiss

about it. To take a viewing stance outside of history (a dubious possibility at

best) is to divorce oneself from a view of philosophy as sequential and

reactive to itself.

To say that philosophy is sequential and reactive to itself suggests a

flux of meaning that would be inherently dangerous to any attempts to

identify what philosophy is, however. It is easy to see how it would be so: is

this description of philosophy a moving one, in a sense capable of dodging

an individual’s attempts to capture it? It would also be easy to argue for this:



one only needs to look at the different ways of doing philosophy (i.e., its

branches) to have an indication that there are about as many interpretations

of what philosophy is as there are philosophers. Obviously, there must be

some central, unifying description of philosophy that accommodates all of its

potential interpretations, lest philosophy run the risk of being dissolved into

a cacophonous mess of (possibly) discordant definitions.

The very difficulty of finding that one description of philosophy that

works for every occasion finds a mirror in the study of metaphysics. From the

very etymological meaning of the word, “beyond physics”, we get a sense

that this is a study that involves something that is possibly outside of the

realm of human perception. In a sense, the object of study of metaphysics,

which includes, but is not limited to, being as being, being in itself, or being

as existence/existing (which are, by the way, not interchangeable; they are

here side by side only in order to highlight the similarities they have in

presentation), is as hard to pin down as that one description of philosophy.

When we talk about metaphysics, we are talking about the underlying

principle behind everything in existence, even the ones that are merely

conjecturally or logically believed to be in existence (arguably, for example,

a Supreme Being). When we talk about an underlying principle for everything

in existence, then, we invariably arrive at the conclusion that this principle is

existence itself. It is the problematic of metaphysics how to provide

principles and explanations for and about this existence. This problematic is

the reason why one can then say that the difficulty of doing metaphysics is

inherently similar to the difficulty of describing philosophy.

The problem with doing any one metaphysics is that a metaphysical

system is always already hermetically sealed; that is, if one presupposes that

this particular metaphysics is true, then it is to the exclusion of all other

ways of doing metaphysics. One might see the difficulty in this when one

thinks about the huge scale of everything that is encompassed in existence,

both what we do and don’t already know. When one reduces everything in

existence to a set of principles (manufactured by a finite human mind, at



that), one makes a dangerous commitment: the commitment to a particular

understanding of everything based on this set of principles. It is dangerous

because it can so very easily be wrong, and that it cannot possibly be

verified by human experience. The transcendental nature of the topics of

discussion of metaphysics leaves no possible room for empirical proof. It

would, for example, be impossible to physically ascertain the quiddity, the

what-ness, of Being (as verb) itself. All we can say for certain about it is, for

example, that it might be what one could call the state of… something-ness,

rather than nothingness, and even then it would be a matter of deduction

and not direct experience. It would seem that the realm of metaphysics

relies on logic in order to formulate its primary principles, by which I mean it

has to construct scenarios using premises that are in logical contradiction in

order for it to negatively arrive at a certainty. But what if the premise is

wrong?

Inherent to the discussion of metaphysics is the transcendental, and a

member of this family of transcendentals is the concept of One. This is

basically the metaphysical concept concerned with what is universal among

all existence, the main shared underlying property that makes all existence

similar (therefore, “one”). Another reason why existence can be called one

as such is that all of existence can be explained to have a singular “source”;

in Greek, it would be called arche. Exactly why this is important is rooted in

the fact that after the ancient era, medieval philosophy centered its search

for this source, as it were, in the notion of a God. In this turn, all of what is in

existence is creation which looks up to a Creator that, through various

circumlocutions, has been called omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and

so on. The belief tradition that stems from faith in a particular

God/gods/whatever principle that works in the same way could be called a

religion. The philosophical discussion of religion is unique in that it presents a

certain paradox: do we or do we not think about it when we talk about it?

One can say this because of the dialectic between faith and reason inherent

in any kind of belief system. To what extent are we capable of talking about



a supreme being without us falling into the trap of assuming we know too

much about it? We are for example presented, at least in the case of the

Judeo-Christian belief systems (which is the context this writer belongs to),

with a particular dilemma: are we to take Sacred Scripture as truth, and

should we do so, how are we certain that is so? Faith had been quite firmly

impressed upon the minds of its adherents to be something that is quite

apart from reason, and yet philosophical thought demands this rational

thinking. It remains that one can seemingly find the justification for the

divine truth-claim of any biblical source only through a hermeneutical

interpretation, which would say that one may only find the truth if one

believes. But we can notice immediately just how subjective this

hermeneutic is. For the truth of a particular divinely inspired text to manifest

itself only to those who choose to or can believe in it suggests that there is

something particular and special about the human being and their capacity

to believe. This divine truth then takes an entirely anthropocentric tune when

taken in that regard.

The experience of faith, as a matter of fact, is another problematic in

the philosophy of religion in that it is precisely that: an experience, as

filtered through particular individuals. As such, the primary asking of what a

religion is supposed to be like as a whole properly belongs to a

phenomenological study. It would be human beings that can talk about their

experience of a supreme being, not the other way around; of course, this is

unless we believe that the supreme beings have directly interacted with

particular persons as provided in Scripture, but this discussion, as had

already been said, belongs to a hermeneutic, the path to which this paper is

not equipped to take. But what is the human being?

The first questions about what it means to be part of humanity came

from the first people who first raised all the other questions (that we know

of): the Greeks. True to form, the questions they asked were interested in

the nature of human beings: to use an Aristotelian vocabulary, what causes

us, what makes us what we are. It had been established very early on that



human beings are physically of the same nature as animals, with one very

important distinction: human being have the capacity to think, but more

importantly, human beings have the capacity to come to the realization that

they are thinking. This self-awareness of thought distinguishes us from all

other existences. We must mark the fact that the ancients were the first

ones to put the primacy on the human being’s capacity for rational thought

above all else, because this is the trend by which all subsequent

understandings of humanity would abide. Medieval scholarship, as we have

seen, suborned the discussion of what it means to be human under the

discussion of what it means to be a creature of God: the question became,

therefore, what it meant to be human in the face of a supreme being, what it

meant for human beings to still exist when there is a power greater than can

even be imagined by existences locked in the finitude of being creatures,

what it meant for humanity to live with the knowledge of the notion of a God.

Modern humanity would have none of this wishy-washy dependence on

the notion of truth as parceled out by magisterial authority (because the

architecture of society by then had the Catholic church as supreme arbiter of

truths, even “scientific” ones). Modern rationality put a premium on reason

never there before: whereas at first reason was at most a tool or a device by

which human beings can understand and observe the world, modern

philosophy seemed to be saying that reason enables one to affect the world.

No longer was the human being a passive entity in the world, trapped in

what amounted to a wait-and-see attitude. Modern rationality took matters

into its own hands and shaped the world according to the dictates of its own

categories. This mighty appreciation of reason came to a head with the

Cartesian affirmation of the foundation of truth as found in the self, as is said

by his famous Cogito. However, Descartes also represented the beginning of

the cracks in modern rationality when he had to divorce the mind from its

bodily shell. The implications of this act, and the resultant transcendental

ego which is capable of standing on top of the world and observing it from



there, as it were, will set in motion a series of revolutions in thought that

question the primacy of an individual reason.

The Cartesian separation of the mind and the body would lead to the

implication that reason is capable of fully separating itself from the influence

of the world that it lives in (an influence that can, of course, merely act upon

the body). The problem with this in a philosophy of humanity is that we are

existing in this world. We know for certain that we, as existences, can be

affected by external factors: we die, we love, we experience. To assert the

separation between the mind and the body is to assert the invalidity of all

experiential evidence as foundation for a coherent system of thought, by

virtue of Descartes’ conviction that bodily, physical, worldly things can “lie”

to our reason. Thus does Cartesian thought represent the pinnacle of a

rationalistic philosophy, where only a priori principles can ever be held as

certain and unquestionable. This will be combated by an empiricist strand of

philosophy, where the reverse is true: the only certain things are those that

can be found in experience. It has its own difficulties as well: due to its rigid

upholding of empirical evidence as inputted via senses, it would have

difficulty tackling the more abstract concepts of philosophy; love, justice,

freedom, for example, would have to be explained in physical terms. It is in

Kant that one can find the first true synthesis of these two strands of

thought, so important in the understanding of a philosophy of humanity in

the modern era. Kant posits transcendental idealism, which in a nutshell is

stating that there are things that are appear to us (which he calls

phenomena) and then there are things about which we cannot even know

anything about (which are the noumena).

Postmodern humanistic philosophy begins by humbling the modern

philosophical understanding: there is no such thing as a transcendental ego

that is capable of looking at the world as a whole. We are always already, in

Heideggerian terms, beings-in-the-world. We are, as had been mentioned

before, children of our context, and thus all of our thoughts are already

shaped by what we can know, and what we can know is what exists in the



world that we are moving in. The emergence of phenomenology is a

response to this. By its very etymology we comprehend that it is a study of

what is phenomenon, what appears to us, what we can experience. It is a

novel field in that it makes no assumptions about metaphysical concepts,

talking only of concepts that the human being, as living in the world, can

reach via their own experience. In a very real sense, phenomenology is one

of the more practical (if we mean by practical that which we can have

primary knowledge of through experience) fields of philosophy, the other one

fitting this category being ethics.

Ethics is, at its core, a system of prescriptions. There is a general

structure to ethics, a structure that begins firstly by taking a particular

understanding of what a human being is, humanity being its only possible

prescriptee. Having established such a foundation, it then posits that based

on this particular understanding of humanity, this or that is “good” or “bad”.

It would then go on to assert certain prescriptions regarding these

conceptions of goodness or badness; it might be something proscriptive, or it

might be something prohibitive, or both. Finally, it will then talk about

principles of application, or something akin to that. We talk here about the

structure of ethics because to talk about the different traditions of ethics

would be too protracted for a synthesis of philosophy as a course. It would

suffice to say that, since as was mentioned earlier any ethics is automatically

a response to a particular understanding of human being as such, it stands

to say that there are about as many strands of ethics as there are

understandings of human nature. If one were to say, for example, that man

is a creature of God, then an ethics based on this human nature would be

founded on divine inspiration and/or the nature of human as a created being,

and therefore possibly owing a debt of obligation to God, which one can

repay through acting in a manner befitting his status (which would be a good

description of the Aquinatian conception of natural law).

As in all prescriptive systems, there is a danger when one assumes

that one system holds precedence above all the others: the danger of it



being not quite able to provide apt prescriptions for the human beings of a

different context. Again, ethics as based on a particular human nature must

take into consideration the context by which that particular human nature

was adjudged. The trouble with an immediate assumption that an ethics is

transhistorical is that it forgets the spirit by which those original laws were

formulated. On the other hand, assuming that an ethics is applicable only on

a case-to-case basis, as it is with utilitarian ethics for example, where the

“happiness of the most people” is the primary principle, is that such an

ethics would then be relativistic, and lose its particular power to compel by

virtue of it being an ethical “high ground”.

As we have seen, the common trend between these analyses is that it

would seem that the plurality of philosophical traditions gives one the image

of a buffet, where there is a “pick what you want” sort of mentality. One

might then look for a determining ground by which one can, to follow the

metaphor, “choose” a particular philosophy that one thinks best suits the

context. In the final summation, one can ask of all philosophy whether it is

“true” or not, and this question belongs to the realm of epistemology.

Epistemology is literally the study of knowledge, knowledge by which one

can assume the truth and/or validity of a proposition. An epistemological

reading of the certainty of philosophical tenets, for example, would then

have to rely on knowledge as such (however arrived at) in order to say

whether a claim is true or valid. Indeed, there is a difference between what

“truth” is, and what “validity” is. Truth as such of any proposition, at least

from the correspondence theory of epistemology, is saying what a thing is

that it is.1 Validity on the other hand is a function of the proposition being

grammatically correct and semantically meaningful.2 But of what we have

seen so far from the discussion of the history of philosophy all the way up to

how ethics can fall into relativity is that a plurality does not meld well with a

1 Antonette Angeles, "Truth," (class lecture, Ateneo de Manila University, November 26,2009).2 Vincent Potter, On Understanding Understanding (New York: Fordham University Press,1994), 3.



correspondence theory of truth, which would have been very helpful in

determining which philosophy to choose, which philosophy to believe in. All

we are left with is at least the knowledge that all of these philosophical

systems are valid based on the criteria provided above.

We see, therefore, that this portrait of philosophy as a whole suggests

a discomfiting notion: there is no one answer to the question of what

philosophy is even to this day. In this era, it seems, it is much more

comfortable to suggest that there might be an “end” to philosophy, or that

philosophy is an obsolete lame duck when compared to other academic

disciplines, which, though they may have competing interpretations of

reality, still at least would not disagree with each other so strongly that an

espousal of one strand of interpretation means the complete disavowal of

another. So if we cannot even name philosophy properly, cannot even

properly talk about that one definition as such that encapsulate everything

within it, how and why are we still able to talk about it; in fact, why must

philosophy then still be talked about?

The answer to this question, one may contend, lies in the assertion

that one must do away with the belief that there has to be only one

definition of philosophy. The tendency is for one to shy away from a so-called

relativistic attitude towards philosophy. One would observe, however, that

this problem seems to arise every time a call for metaphysical certainty is

raised.

This is the heart of the problem of this “relativistic” view of

philosophy. When one makes a stand about a particular philosophical

system, one is inevitably assailed with the question of whether such a

system is true, whether it would hold for all instances, all the time. There

seems to be a radical forgetfulness of the fact that whereas the concept of

oneness is a metaphysical one, and is next to impossible to attain to, the

concept of a plurality is a phenomenologically available one. To begin the

asking of what philosophy is from the stance of one seeking to catch the



whole reality of it suggests a trace of hubris: the very asking of what

philosophy is, in fact, implies that one is, in fact, able to answer the question.

An understanding of context, and where it properly applies, does not

constitute what would be called a relativistic attitude at all. The importance

of talking about this lies in the apparent disdain for a relativistic view of

philosophy (or anything) on the grounds that it seems to not be able to take

a stand for anything. The problem with this notion of “stand”, however, is

that it is another one of those closed systems, whereby the assumption that

everything must abide by this or else it is wrong is made. The inherent

danger in this is that there is always new data to be had, and interpreted. To

take a stand despite context is akin to standing in the middle of a highway

no matter what, even if the “no matter” is a trailer truck hurtling towards it

at a hundred miles per hour.

In the end, then, one may contend that philosophy is not a closed

system, hence the impossibility of being able to talk about it in wholistic

terms. One would contend, however, that the question needs to be asked

still, if only to demonstrate the inherently dangerous hubris behind it, and

replace that hubris instead with an openness to discourse. Philosophy will die

a natural death indeed when it becomes no longer capable of looking at itself

critically, and assessing if it is still true to the spirit of its time. In the final

analysis, all of philosophy is contextual, and it is only open discourse,

through both space and time, that saves philosophy from finally becoming

the ivory tower that the people at its periphery believe it to be. There can be

no answer to the question of the relevance of philosophy unless philosophy

becomes relevant to itself. Philosophy without the capacity for internal

discourse will be without the capacity for external discourse: philosophy

would then end up becoming nothing so much as roadkill.

Works Cited



Angeles, Antonette. “Truth.” Class lecture, Ateneo de Manila University, November

26, 2009.

Potter, Vincent. On Understanding Understanding. New York: Fordham University

Press, 1994.

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