Self Reflections

I am a rank amateur philosopher, having read more summaries of Plato by others than stuff Plato actually worte. Caveat freely given, let me offer some sweeping observations about modern philosophy.

First, so much of it reads like caricatured theology. It is dense, impenetrable, and seems to deal mostly with concepts in the ether (try reading Hegel or Heidegger). It exactly resembles what the enlightenment philosophers so ardently derided in their medieval forbears.

Second, no matter which school, they all seems to take for granted Kant's Critique--that we can't actually know for certain anything outside of ourselves (noumena), only how those things appear to us (phenomena). And so the philosohpy becomes an intrictate detailing of the 'inner man', of what it is like to be a person, of how we know what we know. And it goes by fancy names like phenomenology. It seems all so self-absorbed.

Third, concomitantly, it neglects the great questions that occupied the original philosophers. The Greeks and their Christian successors by and large philosophized about the ultimate nature of reality--Heraclitus saying it is fire, Plato saying it is Ideas, Aristotle saying it is particulars, Augustine saying it is God and His City, etc. Since Kant, philosophers seem to have given up on knowing anything about the ultimate nature of reality and are content only to know about the ultimate nature of ourselves.

Which brings us back to the theological nature of some modern philosophy. It stands to reason--if the self and its experiences are the only ultimate reality of which we can have knowledge, then the study of it is has more or less replaced the study of theology; merely paralleling, perhaps, the replacement of the God of theology with another, far less grand or interesting.