I came across a a book on economics research methodology today – at least that’s what the title suggested. The first page ended up being devoted to telling some interesting stuff about Philosophy of Science that I thought would be extremely interesting to share. It failed terribly in an attempt to surprise me with the fact that Philosophy of Science has nothing to do about studying the social or other implications of scientific discovery, nor has it have any hint of links with studying the ethics involved in scientific research and discovery.
The thing that intrigued me came later – the book spoke of the Philosophy of Science, as a field that tackles the logic involved in the scientific research and debating on what is really science; probably questioning the methods involved, the level of ‘scientificity’ of the methods and so on. I guess that was the precursor to how methods of study are important, so important that it is probably more essential than the study itself.
Very often, I must say, we think always about the will, we attempt to rationalise, give reason, produce purpose and otherwise, things do not make sense. In a way, I must say that our emphasis on reasoning is quite surprising, for we can easily have our emphasis on the ‘way’, the methods rather than the will. So much so that we have a line that says, ‘When there’s will, there’s way’ and the statement could easily have been otherwise.
The world can center around finding ways, for absolutely no reason, then conceive a reason for it. This has been going on in the commercial world, just not widely publicised. More commonly, it appears in the sotware world, where people design these wares for just aesthetic reasons or absolutely nothing at all. Other times, we design a software that, say, save the screen in some way (right now I still couldn’t conceive a purpose for screen-saver), and don’t bother to think of a reason for it. There are worse times – we design some lame toy and make it fashionable (reason given: the toy looks cute).
Being a purpose-centered world, we seek to rationalise everything before working on it – something with no purpose has no value. As such, the reason for something to exist must exist before the thing exist. From an existentialist perspective, that’s not true. Things must exist to create a purpose for itself. Therefore, we have many things that existed, then a reason is created for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. Screen-savers and trendy toys prevails because we have the ‘way’ before the ‘will’. Yet this does not justify a step towards the more ‘way-world’ – because there’s greater reason to remain in the ‘will-world’. The void in philosophical studies about the existence of man requires that we use the ‘way-world’ paradigm, and such would necessitate that all man possess no single will and thus, monoism cannot be possible – unless of course, there is only one will in the first place.
The world must start to heterogenise in the harmonious way that glues way to will. We must approach the ‘way-will’ world so that pseudo-will cannot persist so force us to contradict ourselves and the way can stand till the will is found – just as man have lived over the ages. I wonder if it is difficult for us to attain that; we are now at a pretty stagnated stage, no one has discovered this form of thinking yet, probably because of culture-training and the pride in our power to reason. This is hard to go against for conventional wisdom suggest very much that with a way without will, the way can hardly be trusted for the way cannot exist without the preceeding will. Just look at life itself and you’ll probably find your answer against conventional wisdom. Let’s not make our life difficult by pursuing the will for way is the way to go (no pun intended).