When Philosophy Speaks

An anthill is one of those things that can only exists because of living things.
It’s a physical construct that happens naturally but doesn’t arise out of dead physical matter blindly following laws of nature. Anthills are formed from living things reacting to their environment. The will of the ants come together depending on their role in their ecology. Each ant playing role in the emergence of the anthill.

A single ant can be isolated. It can exist by itself. But it doesn’t produce anything without the context of its ecosystem. Which requires other ants and a certain habitat.

The human experience can also exist by itself. A bit more independent than the ant, human beings can create great things by themselves. But can create even greater things together.

The human tools are a bit more complex than ants. Human can create a lot more abstract concepts from reality as-is and then reimagine a different reality by restructuring the reality they imagine from the world they see.
One can say that humans reimagine the world as they imagine it being in the first place, because your perspective of the world is not the world as it is. Your perspective of the world is as you imagine it to be.

Your image of the world can have objectivity the closer you look at it. And the greater that science gets, the more objective the image of the world you have can be. Because we’re increasingly mapping reality at a greater depth; scientifically and artistically.

But one cannot shake the fact that all this science is not studying the world as is. It’s studying the world within-context.

And existentially we’re growing more accustomed to willingly contextualize ourselves in this world of within-context.

But the more that we exist in this world of “within-context” (ie, withing the context of chemistry, physics, biology, physiology), the more we trivialize what exist outside that context.

That we’re gaining an unprecedented knowledge in all of these scientific fields is nothing to scoff at. Our society’s discourse includes plans to colonize Mars, cure life-threatening diseases that have plagued humanity for thousands of years, and slowly expanding first-world living conditions to more and more people around the world.

All this thanks to science. But science is a language that we can speak. But humans are multilingual. Just because sometimes we choose to speak in philosophy, or in art, or in religion, or in math, or in whatever other language, doesn’t mean that we stop knowing how to speak science.

If I speak Spanish, English, and French, I can sometime speak English. Sometimes I can translate phrases from Spanish (maybe losing something in translation in the process). Sometimes I can just say French words to communicate (to ensure nothing is lost in translation). Sometimes I can use loanwords that don’t choose their translation while still serving to communicate.

Just because I’m speaking in English and saying things that can’t be said in other languages (unless I want to risk losing something in translation), doesn’t mean that I invalidate Spanish or French.

Just because some people are not dogmatic towards Science and can stop speaking Science doesn’t mean they deny Science. It just signals the mutli-dimensionality of life that you need many languages to express all the different facets of absolute Truth.

Faith, believe, love, trust, betrayal, hatred, xenophobia can be explained in the Science language. But it’s different to experience these things first hand. You cannot just use science to express these emotions and state of minds through their corresponding chemical or neurological state of matter.
If you say something false in English, then it’s also false in Spanish and French (mostly). If it’s not, it’s because meaning or context changes between language (hence the source of lost in translation).

Absolute Truth is something that can be said in all languages. It doesn’t lose anything in translation because it’s absolutely transcendent. Absolutely metaphysical.

A lot of languages overlap but express things a little differently. I personally think that philosophy as a language encompasses all languages; but the languages of hard sciences (ex., chemistry, physics), the languages of the soft sciences (ex., sociology, psychology), the languages of math, the languages of arts, etc, all have their limits. That’s why philosophy’s aim is transcendent. It’s metaphysical. It’s absolute Truth.

When humans talk in all these languages, it gives rise to truths that can be said in philosophy somehow.

When humans talk to one another, they start forming metaphysical understandings of all abstract topics. They discuss the individual reality that exists in each others minds. In doing so, they put their metaphysical critical thinking skills to use and start creating metaphysical anthills. That dig to the realities of the universe and they begin to discover truths. Find comfort inside physical reality. Find safety inside the universe using the tools that evolution allowed them access to.

Just because we know these languages doesn’t mean we’re fluent in them. Doesn’t mean we ignore them or deny them sometimes. Turn a deaf ear. Some people don’t have the full capacity to be fluent in these languages. But we all do metaphysics to those that can understand the language. In everything we do, there’s a glimpse of a deeper morality, logic, understanding (epistemology), and, more fundamentally, metaphysics. There’s also an interpretation of our action by the different languages of science, math, art, etc.

We can speak to ourselves (solipsism) but we can’t create an anthill by ourselves. We’re all solipsists until we accept our roll in society and our need for each other to give proper life to our different languages. Languages need validity. They need proof and confirmation.

Because languages aim at grasping the metaphysical. And the metaphysical can only be approximated at with our different perspectives. By ourselves, everything we say is true. It’s a tautology. But a tautology is absurd and doesn’t mean anything. We can be solipsists but so what? We can so much more not being solipsists. Being vulnerable and speaking out and having our approximation of the metaphysical reevaluated by others. And as a result getting closer to the metaphysical. To absolute truth.