583. Irony of philosophy

Continental Philosophy (CP) seems to be saying that nothing is fixed. I have finished a book on that, with the title ‘Coherence of Continental Philosophy’.

The turbulence, out there and in here, implies that for over 2000 years philosophy has been chasing illusions of ultimate, fixed meanings, ideas, theories, logics, mathematics, identities, laws of nature, and truths. If that is true, what a waste of talent and effort!

 How could this happen? If nothing is fixed, we are engulfed by uncertainty, and that scares many people. It makes them feel unsafe, and they flee into mysticism, then religion and then science.

 We should see it as liberation, and some do. How boring it would be if there were an end to change and discovery. Taoism, of Lao-Tse and Zuanghzi,  celebrated the unpredictability of the world, and pleaded for resilience to uncertainty, and adaptability. Its iconic metaphor was water, which takes the shape of the container it is in, and flows around the rocks in a stream, not through them. To enable adaptation, Taoism pleads for a minimum of rules (‘wu-wei’).

 Kierkegaard opened a problem of time. The present lies between past and future, and cannot be grasped. When you think you have it, it has already evaporated in the past. You could grasp it only if time stood still. Perhaps that happens in death, and perhaps you experience it then as eternity. While alive, one can look at movement, and try to adapt to it.

 An example of the flight from uncertainty lies in economics. There, one flees into risk. In risk, one does not know what is going to happen, but one knows what can happen, attach probabilities to it, and calculate an optimal outcome. With uncertainty that is impossible, because one does not know all that can happen, and since economists want to calculate, they ignore it, and as a result does not adequately deal with innovation.

 Economists dream of equilibria, but evolutionary economists warn that those are seldom reached, and they study the process of evolution, where equilibria are mostly not achieved. .