The True Philosopher

What is a true philosopher? What distinguishes them from other people? Are philosophers smarter, wiser or crazier? Answers to this question have been sought since the beginning of philosophy. Plato's answer to this question is:

"... philosophers are those who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging, while those who are incapable of this but lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things, are not philosophers ..." (Plato, Republic, 484b)

This quote is related to Plato's idea that reality is unchanging and fixed and that our ever changing perceived reality is an illusion. He illustrated this idea in the Allegory of the Cave. In this allegory, we are imagined to be locked in dark a cave. What we perceive as reality are in fact shadows, cast by objects in the cave. Reality is, according to Plato, not the shadows on the wall, nor the objects that cast the shadows. Plato thinks that reality is the unchanging world outside the cave. Philosophers are, in Plato's view, those people who are able to unchain themselves and leave the cave. Once outside, the true philosophers are those who are able to stare into the sun - to look absolute truth in the eye.

It is my contention that Plato's idea of a philosopher needs to be reversed. The ever changing, unpredictable and chaotic reality we perceive is the real reality and our ideas of a reality above our perceived reality is the illusion. We have this illusion because it is psychologically not satisfying to have to accept that reality is unpredictable.

The main reason we have issues with dealing with the unpredictability of reality is that we have the ability to think about the future. Our huge frontal lobes allow us to think ahead in time much more than any other animal. This ability is a blessing as much as a curse, because with it comes a fundamental existential uncertainty. The fact that the future is, even in our best efforts, is unpredictable, causes anxiety. This anxiety causes a cognitive dissonance and we try to relieve it by constructing vehicles that reduce the dissonance. These vehicles - or language games, as Wittgenstein calls them, alleviate our anxiety by constructing an ideal reality in which there is no unpredictability. These language games become vehicles for meaning and reality - a foundation for our mind (See also my paper Religion as a vehicle for Meaning). In reality, these constructs of the mind are sky-hooks, based on nothing but the urge to reduce existential anxiety.

In my view, the true philosopher is the person who is able to accept the fundamental unpredictability of life and able to live in an existential hot-air balloon, flying over the landscape of philosophical and religious constructs.