First, a little about what philosophy is, and then on to my own philosophy.
Philosophy means love of wisdom, and along that line of thought, the ancients explored the world around them and wrote beautiful treatises on the nature of the world around them, the nature of the divine, politics, history, and a grand and complex number of topics that can mean only one thing, the Greeks invented the scientific method as a set of clearly defined explorations and experimentations intended to reveal the nature of a thing to them.
Did they get it all right? Of course not, they were at the beginning of man’s exploration into things that, until then, had remained part of a religious mystery and which superstition had stopped man from exploring with too much enthusiasm.
The Greeks were not alone, of course, from China to Egypt to the cities of the Americas, man explored nature and his own ability to manipulate it with great fervor and delight. But the Greeks developed entire methodologies designed to elicit answers from the world, and in doing so began the European march toward technological greatness.
Had it not, perhaps, been for slavery, the ancient Greeks and Romans may have started the industrial revolution nearly 2,000 years before it happened in America. The world’s first steam engine (steam turbine, actually) was not invented in the 1800’s, it was invented in Alexandria by a man known to us as Heron of Alexandria.
Others, such as Plato, deigned to tackle politics and the very nature of human society and religion, taking on the establishment and it’s machinations, while others, like Aristotle sought to explore the way the human body works, getting much of it wrong, but at least establishing certain methods and means by which later philosophers and doctors could work to learn the body’s many mysteries.
What we think of philosophy today has essentially stripped the art of the philosopher of the dirtier aspects of exploration, not getting your hands dirty, allowing specialized forms of science/philosophy to develop and run with their own explorations.
Modern philosophy tackles matters of the mind, politics, religion, and social development. Religious philosophy is called Theology, or the study of the “word of god” and for many, it means Christian theology. The truth, however, is that all religions have their theologians and philosophical explorers.
I am no philosopher!
My explorations are fairly selfish. I seek to understand why I feel certain ways when confronted with the divine. Why I rail against certain concepts and whether this is a sign that those concepts are the wrong path to follow or whether I am simply too stubborn yet to go there.
My personal philosophy in life, however, is to take a firm stand on what it is I believe while still allowing for the fact that I am a very imperfect and mortal man who must learn from the Gods rather than dictate who they are. I sometimes fail at the latter, and I understand that about myself, for I have a sometimes too rigid mentality.
That alone tends to preclude me from being a philosopher.
But here I will go into a little of what I believe to be true from my own explorations, and will follow up on these concepts in other sections of this site.
Immortal and eternal are two very different concepts. An immortal being is born but does not die under normal circumstances. The being is, however, capable of dying, and in this way is essentially mortal. An eternal being was never born, will never die, and has not the capacity to die in a true sense. I believe the Gods are eternal.
Man is as much responsible for the way the Gods are depicted in human religion as the Gods are by manifesting to us. That is to say, the forms we give the Gods, those statues, frescoes, etc., are as much our interpretation of how they may appear, always giving them forms we are comforted by or frightened by. For this reason, every culture, every race, gives the Gods forms that are familiar to them. When anthropomorphic, the Gods look like the people who worship them, when animal forms are used, it is animals that people know and must contend with that the Gods seem to take in art.
The relationship between man and god must be reciprocal. Man should not bow down to the Gods as a slave to a master, but behave as a fully aware and responsible being. Proud and capable, not a sniveling fool.
Man must become aware that the Gods do not have our best interest at heart, rather that they have interests of a vast complexity that we are part of but which, if necessary, could include our destruction if our existence becomes a detriment to the over all balance.
There is no afterlife.
The underworld and its Gods are the Gods of destruction, chaos, and balance. Death is part of the balance of the universe, not an evil.
The Gods are eternal, but not infinite in number.
Etc.
Why I have come to these conclusions is actually a great hodge-podge of influences from general ideas about the nature of the Gods to the weight of a handful of dirt. Experience, plain and simple.
My philosophy of life, however, is a different matter.
It is my belief that to live a life of morality and ethics in a Hellenic system is to recognize myself as but part of a greater thing. That I, the individual, am not as important as my family group which is not as important as our culture and civilization, which is not as important as our nation, which is not as important as our species which is not as important as our world.
It is realizing that I am selfish, and that nature demands a certain level of selfishness, but that as a human being I must be able to release that selfishness and be willing to do what is best for others.
This does not preclude me from self-indulgence, though, nor does it stop me from sometimes being a total dick. But it is in recognizing these and trying to make amends for them when I do that my philosophy of life takes hold of me. Never do anything that you can’t talk about with at least a few people.
I will go into morality and such in other sections of this site…