Sometimes they are purely philosophical questions, other times scientific ones, although, as some may recall, the separation of knowledge is no longer something we believe in as we once did. It is a very interesting matter, one that I have been working on for some time and which, over the years, I have entrusted to short essays for journals, while waiting for a longer work in which I hope to express my position clearly, cohesively, and effectively. <\/p>\n
That said, returning to the great questions, it\u2019s clear that for a \u201cphilosopher\u201d like me, the first is: Why being and not nothing? It\u2019s an extremely complex question, one that Heidegger most recently tackled in his own way. For him, Western thought has taken the wrong path: it has forgotten being, focusing instead on the entity, the thing, that has dominated the scene and led man to believe he could manipulate it (something he could never do with being itself). This culminates in the will to power of Nietzsche. In his view, being has been \u201centified\u201d, made into a thing, but being cannot be handled that way \u2014 it should be approached for what it is: the non-entity, the nothing. <\/p>\n
His ideas, provocative to say the least, seem themselves driven by a kind of intellectual will to power that aims to make such theses acceptable (fascinating yet tenuous, and treated head-on in my long work in progress). Especially considering that Heidegger, while rejecting a subjectivistic knowledge of man, that is, a knowledge driven by will to power, where the subject manipulates the object, nonetheless makes a series of declarations about being, science, and hermeneutics that suggest a capacity to grasp reality which somehow escapes the very critique he directs at Western metaphysics. <\/p>\n
Critics, for their part, have often taken issue with Emanuele Severino for his stance, for claiming to have theoretically halted the nihilistic drift of Western thought. But what, then, about Heidegger? He too sought to oppose the metaphysics that preceded him, though to be fair, he traced the worst of it only a few centuries back, to the era of Descartes and Galileo. For me, it remains important to ask the fundamental questions, and \u201cWhy being and not nothing?\u201d is certainly one of them. Yet we might wonder whether such questions are \u201call too human,\u201d meaningful to us but not to reality itself. <\/p>\n
Thought, after all, is presumably the finest product man possesses for interacting with the surrounding environment and surviving within it, but not necessarily for grasping ultimate reality. We believe otherwise because we are heirs of Galileo, who thought man could know reality with the same quality of knowledge that God possessed, since reality spoke the mathematical language, and mathematics was, and still is, accessible to man. <\/p>\n
These are, of course, open questions, unlikely ever to find a definitive answer. One could linger on more \u201cscientific\u201d questions, nearly (and I stress nearly) as fascinating. As an unconventional philosopher, being, I repeat, a theorist of writing \u201cforced\u201d at times to deal with philosophy, I sometimes overhear scientific issues that make me sit up in alert. For example, some scientists warn against asking what existed before the universe, simply because \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter\u201d presuppose the existence of time, and time does not exist outside the universe. <\/p>\n
In asking such a question, you contradict yourself: if you ask what came before time, you are already implying time, since only within its framework can you speak of a \u201cbefore.\u201d At this point, one might ask why, if it is meaningless, scientists still concern themselves with the beginning of the universe, knowing full well they cannot address the truly interesting question: what happened an instant \u201cbefore\u201d conception, being able to deal only with conception itself. <\/p>\n
Many think it describes the moment before the universe arose, but it would seem quite the opposite, it concerns something that already existed. To look at what was \u201cbefore\u201d the universe is to ask the wrong question, one that should at least be reformulated. I would put it this way: what was there before the universe, and therefore before time, which in truth was not \u201cbefore,\u201d since time did not yet exist? Whatever it was, it was not \u201cbefore.\u201d It\u2019s a situation that, as the reader will notice, we can\u2019t even imagine. Once again, man speaks of things he cannot represent, as Bishop Berkeley already observed, and we know how that turned out. <\/p>\n
Science, like philosophy, has no certainties. Yet these are enriching questions \u2014 and it would be a shame never to have touched them, as might happen to a poor man of letters like me, before closing his experience on this earth. <\/p>\n
Every man asks himself the great questions. At least, he should do so once in his life. Sometimes they are purely philosophical questions, other times scientific ones, although, as some may recall, the separation of knowledge is no longer something we believe in as we once did. It is a very interesting matter, one that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1022,"featured_media":900498,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-900497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-omnibus"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n