A Different Perspective

As of late, I have had the pleasure of reading both Sophie’s World and Ishmael in order to fulfill a class requirement. However, I found that I gained a lot of in-sight because of these books. I was able to look into a lot of famous philosophers and thinkers that I have never had the pleasure to read. However, the books also gave me a new way to look at everything. Then again, all forms of philosophy incorporate that the reader or pupil tries to look at something that might be everyday or common in an entirely new perspective.

The most intriguing part of the books was the approach to Man’s ultimate destiny. Now to a talking gorilla like Ishmael, the ultimate destiny of Man is revealed to be to destroy the planet and to use it to whatever their hearts’ desire. To others though, Man may have a different destiny. To a man like Immanuel Kant, one is decisive of his or her own destiny. In many ways, this is because humans cannot always assure themselves of the Absolute Truth of anything. Man can just as much prove that God exists and controls the world through religion as they can prove that the world was formed by the Big Bang. In the end, we are incapable of philosophically discovering the absolute truth.

Then there are others that say God is an absolute and that reasoning cannot exist without him. St. Augustine and others have said that it was though God’s creation of the world that one would gain a better understanding of reality in the world. After all, that follows the theory that in order for us to truly interpret the world, we need to understand the miracle of its creation. However, philosophical discussion of God is like that of trying to debate on the subject of whether the chicken or the egg came first: the argument can go on and on.

In the end, we need to realize that we need to live life to the fullest and do what we can to make ourselves in this dog-eat-dog world.