Nefastos wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2019 9:57 am
Would we need some more spirit of "divine Plato" (search after truth because of its own sake) in our world view building?
Or do you see the question in a different manner?
Is the world so shattered that hope for truth has followed God to death, and we now live the age of "whatever works"?
I don't find anything to object to in OP's observation itself - actually I think it's very pertinent. But the implication, seen here as well as in other posts, that the epistemic state of people on average was somehow better in the past I find really far-fetched. If the "God" in "God is dead" is a worldview / set of values that an entire culture shares, then its death is unambiguously good for rationality / more people having more beliefs that align with reality. The "market" of worldviews in today's society is far from the manasic ideal of people truly putting their beliefs to the test, but it is much closer to that than a single arbitrarily prescribed worldview that is not questioned even on the level of "do I personally like this".
And if "God" here is taken to mean an ideal of striving for truth - rather than a fixed set of beliefs - then there is no point at all in situating its more complete actualization in the past. Sometimes I'm really quite bothered by the tendency of occultists to idealize societies like ancient Athens (which I use as an example because of the reference to Plato), seeing as most of them were incredibly brutal slave states. I don't know if Plato has written anything comparable, but I recall at least Aristotle having an actual defence of slavery somewhere in his works.
Anyway, when it comes to this thread's topic proper, I think people and their belief systems would benefit the most from psychological self-awareness - from knowing what one
wants to be true and why. It is impossible to wholly escape these self-serving motivations in ones reasoning, so the best course of action is trying to be honest about them. I remember seeing this thought in a very clear, fresh way after hearing of the existence of an academic discipline called "fan-theory" or something like that, like a field of study about what it means to be a fan of something. I was suddenly struck by how many of my thought processes must be conditioned by what I find cool, desirable, admirable. This doesn't necessarily mean skewed reasoning on a small scale, when examining a specific question, but more likely what I find cool etc. - whan I'm a "fan" of - determining which questions I find worth asking in the first place. Of course my more rationally derived values also influence what emotionally appeals to me, so the causal relation isn't one-sided, but it is certainly worth looking into.
Tiden läker inga sår.