25. marraskuuta 2009

Donka Paneva

Damyan Damyanov School of Humanities, Sliven, Bulgaria

I

The definition of philosophy as “loving wisdom” has determined its most significant task - the search for truth. To explain this let us proceed from the proposition of the sophist Protagoras: ”Man is the measure for all things, for those which exist that they exist, and for those which do not exist” and Socrates’s “I know that I know nothing”. First of all they both claim that there is nothing certain as far as man is concerned because their aspirations after truth and wisdom remain in progress as these aspirations are not certainties but possibilities that may occur and be developed into knowledge only through the help of human thought. In brief it is man that we consider in the centre of the problematic definitions of truth and wisdom because it is the existential potential in any human being that determines our feeling of defining things in order to label our doubts.

So, what philosophy gives man is practically nothing but doubt and an endless searching of truth. But does this mean that man is doomed to live in fear, without being able to find or have the missing answers about their existence; to be exposed to uncertainty for as long as the human kind exists? I suggest that we accept man as a unity of opposites balanced by their rationality in a way that life must be preserved. Thus life is an endless struggle and the so called conformism is a perfect way of calming down our unbearable doubts by locking them deeply in our subconscious ness and allowing certain defined customs to enslave our fundamental right - to set free our thoughts so we can “self - choose” all the possibilities for ourselves in accordance to Kant’s categorical imperative. But human nature is organized in such a way that we’d better like having our conscience clean by declining our right for freedom (“Escape from freedom”, E.Fromm), and the unbearable doubt would never be a problem anymore. But if thought is what be set free from the enslaving dogmatism then it is the philosophical questions and the endless searching of truth that can provoke and keep the only reasonable and true condition for a significant existence - our sense of doubt and wonder. So philosophy has the power to provoke us to overcome slavery by suggesting us an “optional life, i.e., our mind relying on the philosophical way of thinking allows us to see things in a different aspect, to call them into question which does not make up fear but frees us to choose and build Guild up a being - for ourselves (Sartre).

Considered in this aspect familiar conceptions such as democracy, for example, may occur in a not so familiar light. Because what is in fact our understanding of democracy: freedom, safety, good life, responsibilities, obeying certain loos that determine our life? All that we accept as truth and as if it is given a priori to us, thus, there is no sense in philosophy at all. It would just mess up the certainty in our life. But democracy also offers the comfortable ways to “Escape from freedom” (Erich Fromm). So what philosophy may teach us is that such things as freedom, rights, equality are meaningful and thus - effective in practice, only if we, human beings, accept them as values not, depending on dogmatic definitions, but determining the significance of our existence.