By their fruits you shall know them
September 12th 2009 07:30
In the bible, Matthew 7:16 to be precise, it states that "by their fruits you shall know them". What this means, by analogy of how well a fruit can bear fruit, is that you can know somebody by their outward manifestations. I will analyse and expand upon the implications of this in more detail:
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in Beyond Good and Evil:
"Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir"
In other words, he is professing the very same idea that Jesus proposed in the Bible, that is, you can know someone by their outward manifestations. This is almost an anti-philosophical idea, for the purpose of philosophy is to find that which is objective through the use of reason. According to Nietzsche, though, all someone's philosophy tells us is not that which is true, but that which they believe; in other words, their subjective outlook upon life.
Let's look at another example: my own blogs. What is interesting is that as I was writing them, I was trying to be as objective as possible. And really, I thought I was being objective, I mean, I was using reason after all, wasn't I? But let's look at some of the blog titles:
If you're bored then you're boring
Judge not, lest ye be judged
Familiarity breeds contempt (about how one gets tired of another after too much time with them)
You can never step in the same river twice (regarding identity issues)
Can you see a common thread here?? It is quite clear that in analysing these issues, I was also revealing the essence of my personality. Someone who is concerned with being bored, someone who is concerned about judgement from others, someone who gets tired from too much company with others... this person (me) is an introvert, with possible social anxiety and perhaps even schizoid tendencies. Their highly analytical nature suggests a strong logical thinking capacity, and the fact that it is applied to the subject rather than the object (the self rather than the world) means that this thinking is of an introverted nature. And here I was thinking that I was discussing pertinent issues! All I was doing was revealing my subjective experience of things, bearing my fruits if you will (perhaps on an intuitive level I knew this was true, and hence why I was a bit embarrassed about showing my blog to people I know).
Now a sceptic might say, "oh, but this is a personal blog, proper academic philosophy or something such as science is free from such subjectivity". Science is a hard one to answer, but philosophy is certainly not free from the subjective. Whatever your beliefs are, they will reveal as much about yourself as they do the world. The reason foe this is that through engaging in an activity, whether it's science, philosophy, sex or whatever else, we automatically reveal our preference for that activity. We obviously value it over other activities at that point in time, otherwise we would do something else (unless we're forced to do that thing, which would still reveal something about our subjective experience).
So where to now for me? For someone who desperately wanted to use the objective in order to escape from the suffering of the subjective? I'm not sure. My subject (self) has a unique relationship with the object (world) and the wrestling between the two is something that will occur as long as I'm alive.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in Beyond Good and Evil:
"Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir"
In other words, he is professing the very same idea that Jesus proposed in the Bible, that is, you can know someone by their outward manifestations. This is almost an anti-philosophical idea, for the purpose of philosophy is to find that which is objective through the use of reason. According to Nietzsche, though, all someone's philosophy tells us is not that which is true, but that which they believe; in other words, their subjective outlook upon life.
Let's look at another example: my own blogs. What is interesting is that as I was writing them, I was trying to be as objective as possible. And really, I thought I was being objective, I mean, I was using reason after all, wasn't I? But let's look at some of the blog titles:
If you're bored then you're boring
Judge not, lest ye be judged
Familiarity breeds contempt (about how one gets tired of another after too much time with them)
You can never step in the same river twice (regarding identity issues)
Can you see a common thread here?? It is quite clear that in analysing these issues, I was also revealing the essence of my personality. Someone who is concerned with being bored, someone who is concerned about judgement from others, someone who gets tired from too much company with others... this person (me) is an introvert, with possible social anxiety and perhaps even schizoid tendencies. Their highly analytical nature suggests a strong logical thinking capacity, and the fact that it is applied to the subject rather than the object (the self rather than the world) means that this thinking is of an introverted nature. And here I was thinking that I was discussing pertinent issues! All I was doing was revealing my subjective experience of things, bearing my fruits if you will (perhaps on an intuitive level I knew this was true, and hence why I was a bit embarrassed about showing my blog to people I know).
Now a sceptic might say, "oh, but this is a personal blog, proper academic philosophy or something such as science is free from such subjectivity". Science is a hard one to answer, but philosophy is certainly not free from the subjective. Whatever your beliefs are, they will reveal as much about yourself as they do the world. The reason foe this is that through engaging in an activity, whether it's science, philosophy, sex or whatever else, we automatically reveal our preference for that activity. We obviously value it over other activities at that point in time, otherwise we would do something else (unless we're forced to do that thing, which would still reveal something about our subjective experience).
So where to now for me? For someone who desperately wanted to use the objective in order to escape from the suffering of the subjective? I'm not sure. My subject (self) has a unique relationship with the object (world) and the wrestling between the two is something that will occur as long as I'm alive.
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