Freedom Stalls When You Can’t Let Go
As I currently see it, the philosophies of thinkers like Böhme, Berdyaev, and Schelling—thinkers who correctly advanced the primacy of freedom in Christianity and thus “liberated” it somewhat from confining and constraining doctrines and dogmas—all culminate in what I can only describe as truncation, not in the abridgment sense, but rather in the sense of being cut short, especially at the end.
Böhme, Berdyaev, and Schelling go far and deep in their explorations of freedom. However, in the end, I am inevitably left with the frustrating feeling that none of them went far or deep enough.
Within this perspective, their respective philosophies strike me as probes that successfully inquired and explored beyond some of the limits set by antecedent assumptions yet were ultimately incapable of extending beyond other seemingly enforced boundaries.
Chief among these is the adherence to the strict monotheistic conceptualization of God, which then necessitated the inclusion of some, if not all, of the omni attributes of the mono-god who creates from nothing, albeit tweaked with philosophical qualifications throughout.
Regardless of how far and deep any of these philosophers of freedom went, their explorations were curtailed or hemmed in by some aspect of the assumptions they seemed, whether consciously or not, to be metaphysically arguing against.
None could bring himself to the point of simply letting go in the metaphysical sense. And if they did, they kept it to themselves.
Böhme, Berdyaev, and Schelling go far and deep in their explorations of freedom. However, in the end, I am inevitably left with the frustrating feeling that none of them went far or deep enough.
Within this perspective, their respective philosophies strike me as probes that successfully inquired and explored beyond some of the limits set by antecedent assumptions yet were ultimately incapable of extending beyond other seemingly enforced boundaries.
Chief among these is the adherence to the strict monotheistic conceptualization of God, which then necessitated the inclusion of some, if not all, of the omni attributes of the mono-god who creates from nothing, albeit tweaked with philosophical qualifications throughout.
Regardless of how far and deep any of these philosophers of freedom went, their explorations were curtailed or hemmed in by some aspect of the assumptions they seemed, whether consciously or not, to be metaphysically arguing against.
None could bring himself to the point of simply letting go in the metaphysical sense. And if they did, they kept it to themselves.
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With regard to their truncation being frustrating, perhaps the most apt definition of philosophy is the practice of being long-winded, which if accepted would make their abridgment virtuous.
Regarding the saying “Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it― Stephen Vizinczey”: It is tempting and cynical to think this. I think, rather, that even the "stupid" are able to learn just about anything, given motivation, good teaching, and adequate time. It's just that for practical purposes there often isn't a good teacher or enough time or motivation available. That's based on my experience as a professor. That just about anything can be learnt is also substantiable mechanistically; that is a bit harder to explain but it's analogous to how a very simple predicate logic can be used to express something as high level as Gödel's incompleteness theorems.