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Truth or Faith?
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) deeply influenced the Vienna Circle, initially provided a philosophical foundation for their logical positivism. Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, and other logical positivists eagerly latched onto his assertion that language functions by picturing facts about the world, leading them to declare that any statement not empirically verifiable or logically deduced was, quite literally, “nonsense.”
If you could not measure it, it was not real. God? A syntax error. Poetry? Emotional static. Even philosophy itself became suspect, a parlor game for the linguistically deluded.
~ james-ungureanu
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I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on.
I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet…
I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society…It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
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Every human culture is an invention that springs from the heart/mind of the people. The political and scientific and economic systems we live in are not immutable creations of God. We make them from who we are. Our psychology is in everything we do, yes, including politics, including science, just as much as art and religion and philosophy.
Our eyes and our attention are pointed outward almost exclusively. The world seems exclusive to our inner events. Everything is happening outside of and around us. We don’t stop to wonder at how we ourselves, individually and collectively, are creating what’s happening.
