Tuesday, May 22, 2007

What's important in life

Building on the post below, personally I think that the Classical philosophers, the Renaissance philosophers, and the Islamic philosophers have everyone else beat when it comes to identifying what's most important in life and suggesting ways to live close to that notion. People who came later, like Marx, may have had stupendous insights into how society actually functions, with suggestions about how to make society better......and in this I'm including people other than Marx who were Marxists, non-Marxian socialists, and Anarchists because Marx himself didn't write much about what the future society should be like....but they weren't in touch with the personal current of life . These other people were. The Germans in the early 19th century, i.e. before the notions of things that they're most known for today had crystallized, had a name for this sort of thing: Lebensphilosophie, Life Philosophy. This is opposed to other forms of philosophy which don't deal as much with what could be called the existential problems of life. They had some good ideas in the early 19th century, but I still believe over all that the Renaissance and others have them beat.

No comments: