Philosophy is composed of two parts, philo- meaning "love" and sophy referring to the goddess Sophia, the goddess (and concept) of Wisdom. Philosophy, then, means "love of Wisdom." A philosopher is someone who is engaged in philosophy, and so has an active love of Wisdom. Examples of philosophy include logic, mathematics, natural theology, history, science, pragmatics, and engineering. To a certain extent, philosophy, or at least wisdom, is what being human is about. After all, we are Homo sapiens, meaning "wise man," Homo being "man" or "human" and sapiens being "wise." In other words, it is the capacity for wisdom that differentiates us from animals as well as from other members of our genus, such as Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisova, and etc. These species are indeed human, as Homo means "human," but they are not wise men. Remember, it is the capacity for being a wise man (or woman) that characterizes our species. But this characterization does not make everyone a philosopher, it merely points to the existence of philosophers among our species, something other species of Homo did not have. Will you be a defining element of our species? If so, you must become a philosopher. To do so, you should first acquaint yourself with a fair sampling of the thought of other philosophers who preceded you. If you value modern technology or civil society, you have philosophy to thank for that!
Before philosophy, the predominant forms of belief were animism and polytheism. Animism is the belief that there is some sort of spiritual force that is embodied in material objects, including those which are nonliving. Animism tends to see the world as operating according to the will and whim of spirits, who will be found in various natural settings. For instance, the movement of the wind may be considered to be the will of the wind to move. The leaders in animistic societies, both spiritual and sometimes political, are often known as shamans. Shamans will oftentimes have special roles within the band or clan that they are leading, including communication with the spirit world, which is believed to be accessed through psychological states that are in disequilibrium with the natural world, such as a trance or hallucination, which may be facilitated through drumming or entheogens such as magic mushrooms, burgot, or other fungal, plant, or animal sources. Shamanistic cultures may also engage in ancestor worship and, by extension, worship the dead, who are sometimes seen as having inhabited and become some force of Nature. As such, natural forces may be seen as the actions of ancestors. The mental states of animistic cultures are exceptionally poor in comparison to all succeeding groups, insofar as they cannot be said to be characterized by rational thinking, which we begin to see become more prominently with mythological systems that begin to establish hierarchies of causal categories. In fact, shamans in these cultures are often characterized by mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, gender dysphoria, and mania, whether they be induced through "crazy wisdom" or as a result of traumas or toxins in utero.
Over time, it was recognized that certain natural forces had more power than others. This was, to an extent, an early philosophical inference to explain the world as a system, though it was still expressed in metaphor rather than in deductive, inductive, or abductive logic. Those natural spirits which were seen as more powerful than the others became identified with gods, or spirits having special or important powers worthy of reverence. This often occurred through war, where one clan or tribe subjugated and assimilated another and its gods, with the proto-rational understanding that the conquered society's deities lacked the power belonging to the victors'. This was the birth of polytheism, the belief in many gods distinct from an animistic conception of natural spirituality. Much as the animistic spirits were seen to animate forces of Nature, the gods were also seen to be embodiments of natural powers. Volcanoes, mountains, earthquakes, rivers, seas, lightning, the Sun, Moon, and stars would all become deified, each being seen as having powers unequaled by other aspects of Nature. In reflection of their polytheism, these societies tend to be organized in an oligarchic fashion, by an inner, sometimes secret society of elite warriors and elders, sometimes organized around an oracle or priest who would continue on with shamanic traditions such as cleromancy, necromancy, and other such religious practices understood to connect to the spirit world.
Even influential chieftains, representing the interests of the warrior elite, elders, and priests who propped them up, could become deities. Indeed, the word God is derived from or cognate to the Gothic term for their chieftains, the Gothi or Godi. At first, favorite ancestors, remembered through song and story, were deified, and were sometimes said to inhabit the stars or other emblems of power. The treatment of chieftains as gods was especially solidified with the invention of monarchy, which followed the development of monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, who is the supreme power. Early stages of this process are known as henotheism and kathenotheism, and involve pantheon relationships where there may be a supreme deity and other lesser deities or serial worship of the deities in a particular order or fashion. The development toward strict monotheism was roughly around the timespan sometimes referred to as the Iron or Axial Age, which we may very loosely consider to be the timespan that people such as Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Abraham, Socrates, and Jesus came around. Monotheism typically involved the belief that all living things descended from or were created by a single Sky Father. In reflection of this belief, monarchy was understood to be a representative of the one true God on Earth who ruled by Divine Right.
It is important to understand that before the philosophers...
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You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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