Philosophy Used To Be Easier

By Leo Gura - January 23, 2017

Imagine what it was like to be alive 2,000 years ago. Ignore what your material life would be like and instead imagine what your epistemic position would be. What would be your inner understanding of what reality is? It’d be totally different than humans conceive of it today. Everything would have a feeling of the unknown about it. Every day you’d get up and wonder: “What are human beings doing here? What the hell is this place?!” You’d wonder that because everyone around you would be just as clueless as you. There were fewer answers at your disposal back then.

In a sense it was much easier for philosophers 2,000 years ago to do true philosophy because they were not as locked into paradigms of religion, science, mathematics, consumerism, culture, etc. Simply because those things all had to be created at some point. We take for granted that these things were not a part of life 2,000 years ago, or if they were, they played a significantly different role. Maybe that’s why 2,500 years ago was the heyday of Western philosophy. The world appeared more mystical and unknown back then, and that was actually true to nature.

Now we have all these excellent models of reality which ironically calcify the mind. A perfect example of: the better the model, the bigger the problem. 2,000 years ago was an intellectual wild west, a no man’s land. Of course one of the downsides to this radical openness and uncertainty was a lot of superstitious theorizing. And the greatest downside was that people didn’t have the great advantage of being able to study history — the massive intellectual blunders that would result in the next 2,000 years from sloppy or rigid thinking. But then again, that is only an advantage if its made use of. Most thinkers today don’t really appreciate these historical blunders and haven’t learned their lessons.

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