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Wisdom, Philosophy, and the Life-World

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Wisdom, Philosophy, and the Life-World Tilburg University A Revaluation of Wisdom as a Way to Reconnect Philosophy With the Life-World Jonkers, Peter Published in: Philosophy and the Life-world Publication date: 2017 Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Jonkers, P. (2017). A Revaluation of Wisdom as a Way to Reconnect Philosophy With the Life-World. In X. He, P. Jonkers, & Y. Shi (Eds.), Philosophy and the Life-world (pp. 41-62). (Chinese Philosophical Studies; Vol. XXXIII). The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. 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A Revaluation of Wisdom as a Way to Reconnect Philosophy with the Life-world PETER JONKERS Introduction The observation or complaint that philosophy is out of touch with the life-world is, by itself, not new. Since the rise of modernity, philosophy has followed the paradigm of the sciences, and even claimed to offer an indubitable foundation to all scientific knowledge. Whereas ancient philosophy accepted the life-world as the domain of the unsettled, contingent, modern philosophy rejected this kind of knowledge as fundamentally unscientific. This approach not only resulted in a redefinition of the essence and task of philosophy, but also in an objectivistic restructuring of the life-world. However, especially since Husserl Crisis of the European Sciences and Heidegger there has been a growing awareness that the paradigm of scientific objectivism and philosophical foundationalism has had a reductionist effect on the life-world. This paradigm has actually functioned as a kind of Procrustean bed, chopping off all those aspects of the life-world that resist objectification, quantifica- tion, and representation, in particular the qualitative, emotive and valuing aspects of the life-world. Hence, it is no wonder that many contemporary philosophers interpret the impact of scientific objectivism and philosophical foundationalism on the life-world in terms of colonization (Habermas) and forgetfulness of being (Heidegger). Similarly, on a day-to-day level, ordinary people have the impression that science is unable to answer the pressing questions that arise from the life-world. To give only two examples: the inability of science to predict, let alone control the impact of its own offspring, namely technology, on the environment, and the fact that a lot of scientifically based solutions of all kinds of societal problems have trust in science. -world existence, such as: a pre-scientific experience of the natural world, the 42 Peter Jonkers historicity of human existence, kinesthetic corporeality etc.1 In this paper, the focus will be on the life-world as the environment, shaped against the horizon of time and space, and in which people give meaning and orientation to their lives.2 From this definition, it becomes clear that the mismatch between the this aspect of the life-world and the objectivism of modern science and the foundationalism of modern philosophy does not so much concern technical or factual issues, but has primarily to do with existential matters, which crop up when science tries to answer questions about the meaning of objective facts for human life. Esp which was very influential during the first half of the twentieth century, is a case in point in this respect: it claimed that scientific rationality was able to solve all moral and existential questions of humankind, from how to define and evaluate social progress to offering a solution to the more fundamental problems of human freedom and destiny. Because, in the course of the twentieth century, it turned out that scientism has failed to live up to its claims, many people nowadays feel disappointed with science and scientific philosophy as such, and, on the rebound, are driven back on all kinds of unreflective convictions and attitudes when it comes to trying to answer existential questions. Therefore, paradoxically, the turn to scientific rationality, which characterizes modernity, has, in our times, led to the rise of all kinds of irrationalism when it comes to responding to the questions and challenges that arise from the life-world. The leading question of this paper is how the rift between philosophy and the life-world can be bridged, thereby starting from the problems, with which philosophy is confronted once it has adopted the scientific paradigm and tries to answer existential questions from that perspective. The thesis of the German philosopher Hans Waldenfels deserves to be quoted in this respect: he is convinced -world, as well as its dwindling societal relevance has to do with its repression of the love 1 Paul Janssen Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 5 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), p. 152. 2 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserliana, Band VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), pp. 314f. Wisdom as a Way to Reconnect Philosophy with the Life-world 43 of or the search for wisdom.3 Against this background, the thesis that I want to examine in the second part of this paper is whether a revaluation of practic relation to the life-world. As will be argued in more detail below, practical wisdom can be defined as a life orientating kind of knowledge, which implies that it is closely related to the life-world. Yet insofar as it claims to give a true orientation to human lives, wisdom also needs to examine critically the presuppositions of the life-world in order to stave off the ideological distortions of this life- world. This aspect, in turn, links wisdom with philosophy. In order to examine whether wisdom can serve as an intermediary between philosophy and the life-world, I start by analyzing, in the next section, why modern philosophy adopted the paradigm of scientific knowledge, and show how this development has affected relation with the life-world. In particular, I will criticize the fact that scientific rationality, because of its reductionist and objectivist character, has separated itself from the life-world. Furthermore, I will argue that philosophy can only relate positively to the life-world if it adopts the idea of reasonableness, which is a broader kind of rationality than the scientific one. In the section thereafter, I propose -definition, namely as the love of wisdom, and investigate whether the idea of practical wisdom can serve as an intermediate to reconnect philosophy with the life-world. It has to be noted that this investigation will remain within the realm of Western philosophy, admittedly, the only one I am familiar with. Yet I think that a revaluation of the idea of wisdom can help to bridge the disjunction between Western philosophy and other philosophical traditions, in particular Eastern ones, as well as between religious and secular traditions of wisdom. A second preliminary remark concerns the philosophical nature of the investigation into the life-world. In fact, the relation between philosophy and the life-world confronts us with an important underlying problem, which will be a major point of attention ship with the life-world always has been and always will be an ambivalent 3 Hans Waldenfels Philosophie und Weisheit (Paderborn, München, Wien, Zürich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1989), p. 9. 44 Peter Jonkers one. If anything, the fierce debates between Socrates and the sophists have made clear that the godfather of the philosophers consistently tried to suspend the seeming wisdom of the sophists, which was actually nothing more than a justification of the existing order, by disqualifying it as mere opinion, unable to stand the test of critical examination.4 relation with the life-world. The life-world can be defined as the cultural environment that is shaped by humans, and, therefore, is inevitably a mixture of appearance and reality. We should be mindful of the fact that philosophy turns into ideology, in the sense of a false consciousness, if it refrains from critically examining the life-world. Instead, it should keep in mind the Socratic motto, according to which only the examined life is worth living, which, by extension, means that one has also to examine the life-world. The Rift between Modern Philosophy and the Life-world Why has philosophy, since the beginning of modernity followed the paradigm of scientific knowledge, how has this affected its relation with the life-world, and what influence did this have on the definition of knowledge and wisdom? My reasons for asking these questions are not historical; rather, they are aimed at a better understanding of the roots of scientific rationality, expecting that this will enable us to find -world. In my historical sketch, I will mainly focus on the philosophy of Descartes, because his views are paradigmatic for the complex relation of the whole of modern philosophy with the life-world, as well as for the claim that science can provide true wisdom. In his Discourse on Method, on account of the certitude and evidence of its reasoning same time being utterly disappointed with the ancient moralists and 5 In order to solve this problem, Descartes takes the fundamental decision, with far-reaching consequences, to expand the mathematical method to all other 4 Günther Bien Philosophie und Weisheit, p.
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