The other day I was thinking about justice, and was trying to understand the meaning of justice, a heinous task that i have forced myself to engage for quite some time now. Why is something just to me, unjust to someone else. The conceptions of justice varies with people in the same efficacious sense as with me. I do not have a tad of doubt in doing things that I presume is just to me. So how did this notion of right/wrong come into me?
To start with, I was wondering where to start? How did I start learning things? How did I learn to differentiate just and unjust (to me)? How do I form opinions about any topic in this life ? Why should I have opinions about anything and everything in this life?
A simple answer would be because I am a human and "I think". For any educated and trained mind A is A. We all think of our thoughts and notions as sui generis and truly unique. But little we realize the difference between objective truth and subjective truth. Perhaps a difficult philosophical question would be to ask yourself, "Am I a rationalist?". I am sure most of us, who claim ourselves to be radical would have asked that question and would have come to a conclusion that "Yes I am one, and a pretty good one at that.." with aplomb. But sadly, that is not the truth, or to be specific, that is not the objective truth. Its simply because, while asserting that question, you make a dubious assumption that "my set of axioms/assumptions (need to) concern only me". A rationalist is a generic term and for all of us to fall into that category we must have had same set of assumptions. And yet, it is as clear as water, that there are different rationalists in their own way.
Simply put, we all start with a null set "U", then as years go by we all have our own taste of life, we start adding elements to that set, based on experience, observations, reasoning which form the objective subset of "U". There is also a subjective subset associated with this set, which comes from the feelings, emotions and reactions to any given situation. Rationality in the sense of subjectivity is driven by the motive of acheiving your goals in an optimal manner. i.e what is good to you, is good to you alone and need not be good to others. Whereas objective truth is something that's always "1" even if you bring in human feelings and emotions. I have tried to be objective in my thinking from the moment I learned the meaning of the word objectivity.
Justice, objectivity, subjectivity, rationalism..... How are these things interconnected? What do you think is rational justice?
I have had this take on rationalism all the while but never got an opportunity to realise what i felt about it until yesterday. It was a normal sunday afternoon siesta. I just got up from my sleep and came out of my bed to the hall, where I saw deepak (my room mate) with a friend of his, Chao Ying, a girl from china and Raj, Nanyang Heights room mate . One of the advantages of studying in an international university is the acquaintance of different people, and cultures from all over the world. After getting introduced, we all sat down over a cup of tea and started picking out topics from air to have a light-hearted banter.
Ying said, " Raj sits next to Fahd (who is from Pakistan) and I just went and put an imaginary line between them, stating this is the border between and India and Pakistan :D "
I said, " Yeah, and China has to make that decision :P "
We all laughed over it. It was just a topic of discussion for us, over a coffee. But there is more meaning to that than this.
"We are told in our schools that we are always right on the face of war, it's "they" who caused problems first", said Chao Ying.
"That is so damn true", I said.
This is the idea of rational justice that is being propagated through out this world. Its all relative (even in thinking), Einstein was right about relativity theory (laughs). If I rack my brains to find one such situation where India or any country for that matter, have accepted their mistake, unless its so obvious, during the face of war, then probably the world would have been a better place to live in. We were taught about how bad the communal riots were, and so Mahatma Gandhi had to separate Hindustan into India and Pakistan. If one thing that i have learned from my social text books, they are that the historians lie, your parents lie, everybody lies, but they all cover it up saying its for a specific greater good." Greater good", is the good of their kin and friends. Good, here is with no doubt the subjective good, where in, its good for few sect of people, and bad for others.
The division of humans based on ideologies and notions is far more a menacing problem than the division based on religions. This is because, these trained minds, with different ideologies were the pioneers in finding different religions/sects/caste. The other few trained rationalists who call themselves the heads of the society used it for their advantage, and its the common man who is facing the repercussions of such a brutal division. Religion, which is considered a primary cause for many man-made calamaties of the nature, follows a set of rules, which changes as and when the ruler changes. There are also people who do not believe in religion and yet beign rationalists are cause of such dreadful events. Its because of the fact that, they close their minds to all those other sets that describe the reasons of actions. One of the evasive replies I get from my friends who like to believe in religion and god is, we are better off following a doctrine of principles, where in the real truth is hidden, and its hard to think of the consequences of public knowing the real truth, for which case the apparent truth is seen as a solution, which gives them the desired mental peace. The other non-god followers, do not want to open up to new "sets" of thinking , simply because they do not seem to see the picture from their systematic gathering of observations. Reason is universal to those people. The rules of my definition of being radical are purely objective and algebraic. 1+4 = 5 always, no matter what. That is objective truth.
We are all living in the illusion of this deliberative rationality, where in we assume we are rational in our thoughts, and justice is universal. But the bare naked truth is we are not considering the totality of all sets that ascertain our system of reasoning. Will opening up your minds to all probabilities and possibilities be a solution? No not yet, there again comes the problem of your definition of "all the sets and assumptions".
Thus, I have shared my purely objective (" you can choose to differ") thought about rationalism and justice that seems to be a pivotal problem in this world along with the minacious problems such as religion, terrorism and God. (No offense to anybody for including God here, because I feel, that is, one of the problems that is affecting human kind in a bigger way than any of us can imagine). Rational Justice is not universal. We all Lie. We should question the existence of every possible and impossible idea, and from there starts the process of learning. These are the hidden truths, that I see in the alto relievo of the sculpture life, and you too have one. We form a taxanomical classification.
To start with, I was wondering where to start? How did I start learning things? How did I learn to differentiate just and unjust (to me)? How do I form opinions about any topic in this life ? Why should I have opinions about anything and everything in this life?
A simple answer would be because I am a human and "I think". For any educated and trained mind A is A. We all think of our thoughts and notions as sui generis and truly unique. But little we realize the difference between objective truth and subjective truth. Perhaps a difficult philosophical question would be to ask yourself, "Am I a rationalist?". I am sure most of us, who claim ourselves to be radical would have asked that question and would have come to a conclusion that "Yes I am one, and a pretty good one at that.." with aplomb. But sadly, that is not the truth, or to be specific, that is not the objective truth. Its simply because, while asserting that question, you make a dubious assumption that "my set of axioms/assumptions (need to) concern only me". A rationalist is a generic term and for all of us to fall into that category we must have had same set of assumptions. And yet, it is as clear as water, that there are different rationalists in their own way.
Simply put, we all start with a null set "U", then as years go by we all have our own taste of life, we start adding elements to that set, based on experience, observations, reasoning which form the objective subset of "U". There is also a subjective subset associated with this set, which comes from the feelings, emotions and reactions to any given situation. Rationality in the sense of subjectivity is driven by the motive of acheiving your goals in an optimal manner. i.e what is good to you, is good to you alone and need not be good to others. Whereas objective truth is something that's always "1" even if you bring in human feelings and emotions. I have tried to be objective in my thinking from the moment I learned the meaning of the word objectivity.
Justice, objectivity, subjectivity, rationalism..... How are these things interconnected? What do you think is rational justice?
I have had this take on rationalism all the while but never got an opportunity to realise what i felt about it until yesterday. It was a normal sunday afternoon siesta. I just got up from my sleep and came out of my bed to the hall, where I saw deepak (my room mate) with a friend of his, Chao Ying, a girl from china and Raj, Nanyang Heights room mate . One of the advantages of studying in an international university is the acquaintance of different people, and cultures from all over the world. After getting introduced, we all sat down over a cup of tea and started picking out topics from air to have a light-hearted banter.
Ying said, " Raj sits next to Fahd (who is from Pakistan) and I just went and put an imaginary line between them, stating this is the border between and India and Pakistan :D "
I said, " Yeah, and China has to make that decision :P "
We all laughed over it. It was just a topic of discussion for us, over a coffee. But there is more meaning to that than this.
"We are told in our schools that we are always right on the face of war, it's "they" who caused problems first", said Chao Ying.
"That is so damn true", I said.
This is the idea of rational justice that is being propagated through out this world. Its all relative (even in thinking), Einstein was right about relativity theory (laughs). If I rack my brains to find one such situation where India or any country for that matter, have accepted their mistake, unless its so obvious, during the face of war, then probably the world would have been a better place to live in. We were taught about how bad the communal riots were, and so Mahatma Gandhi had to separate Hindustan into India and Pakistan. If one thing that i have learned from my social text books, they are that the historians lie, your parents lie, everybody lies, but they all cover it up saying its for a specific greater good." Greater good", is the good of their kin and friends. Good, here is with no doubt the subjective good, where in, its good for few sect of people, and bad for others.
The division of humans based on ideologies and notions is far more a menacing problem than the division based on religions. This is because, these trained minds, with different ideologies were the pioneers in finding different religions/sects/caste. The other few trained rationalists who call themselves the heads of the society used it for their advantage, and its the common man who is facing the repercussions of such a brutal division. Religion, which is considered a primary cause for many man-made calamaties of the nature, follows a set of rules, which changes as and when the ruler changes. There are also people who do not believe in religion and yet beign rationalists are cause of such dreadful events. Its because of the fact that, they close their minds to all those other sets that describe the reasons of actions. One of the evasive replies I get from my friends who like to believe in religion and god is, we are better off following a doctrine of principles, where in the real truth is hidden, and its hard to think of the consequences of public knowing the real truth, for which case the apparent truth is seen as a solution, which gives them the desired mental peace. The other non-god followers, do not want to open up to new "sets" of thinking , simply because they do not seem to see the picture from their systematic gathering of observations. Reason is universal to those people. The rules of my definition of being radical are purely objective and algebraic. 1+4 = 5 always, no matter what. That is objective truth.
We are all living in the illusion of this deliberative rationality, where in we assume we are rational in our thoughts, and justice is universal. But the bare naked truth is we are not considering the totality of all sets that ascertain our system of reasoning. Will opening up your minds to all probabilities and possibilities be a solution? No not yet, there again comes the problem of your definition of "all the sets and assumptions".
Thus, I have shared my purely objective (" you can choose to differ") thought about rationalism and justice that seems to be a pivotal problem in this world along with the minacious problems such as religion, terrorism and God. (No offense to anybody for including God here, because I feel, that is, one of the problems that is affecting human kind in a bigger way than any of us can imagine). Rational Justice is not universal. We all Lie. We should question the existence of every possible and impossible idea, and from there starts the process of learning. These are the hidden truths, that I see in the alto relievo of the sculpture life, and you too have one. We form a taxanomical classification.
