Enlightenment and Meditations.

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As Kant talks about enlightenment, I can't help but to think to how some school systems are presently working. My mother recently retired from working with a nearby school system, and the idea that a child can fail and still be pushed to the next grade is beyond foolish (as to note, they fail because they just don't care). It makes it easier for people to now know common knowledge. It's strange, considering we have the internet at our fingertips, and can essentially learn anything we want to from it, yet. So many just...ignore the possibilities that are laid before them. They'd much rather be the minor and let governments or whomever is above them guide them for their whole lives.

With Descartes meditations, it made me think about how writers build worlds within their heads. The mentioning of being a thinking thing feels like it would be something within a character of a novel, making the writer a type of god over their story. The characters form themselves, and for a part, think for themselves. But the end goal of the story is always set, is it not? It's a good reflection back to the idea that we're in God's book. He created us, our story, our beginning and end, but as for what we want to choose to make ourselves? We have the freedom.

I commented on Brock and Will's posts.

Comments

  1. Nathanael C. CarrollSeptember 18, 2017 at 11:23 PM

    I enjoyed your thoughts on Kant, but I would say that common knowledge and even the internet would not play into the idea of enlightenment as much as personal insight and reason.

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  2. Noah PalframanSeptember 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM

    So in regards to your comment on Descartes speaking of himself as a "thinking thing", he never defines the "thing" that he is. The thinking thing can think to itself, and therefore it perceives itself as existent. However, what Descartes never touches on is how do we perceive other "thinking things"? We cannot know their thoughts, or know if they even have thoughts. So we would be right to say that anything that is not "my existence" is not a "thinking thing". This is where perception and its concept grow fuzzy because by Descartes' model, a "thinking thing" cannot perceive what is outside its own being and therefore nothing exists but itself. (So maybe a hive mind is the answer to this problem, as at that point many "thinking things" know of each other's being.)

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