Philosophy

By Noverius Laoli

Gnothi Seauton, know your self - Socrates

The word of philosophy was come from Ancient Greek, Philosophia, Philos (Love) and Sophia (wisdom), so it mean Love of Wisdom, the man who learned philosophy is a philosopher. And we can call him/her a lover of wisdom. Philosophy is different with theologi. We can call a man who learned Teologi is a lover of God.

There are some questions about philosophy. For examples, how to love a wisdom? And Socrates answer, if we want to love a wisdom, we should know our self (Gnothi Seauton). In other words, the wisdom is the result of knowledge inside us. The next question is: When we have to know our self? or How to know our self? Socrates answered, one knows him self if he knows his/her limitation or knowing the limit of the self. So we can say ‘know our limition’ is very important to be a lover of wisdom.

To be a philosopher should know his limitation. There are three limit that he/she must realize: Epistemology limit. This means limit of knowledge. The man must be able to differentiate between truth and error. He should know, when he knows something and when he doesn’t know. Consciousness about conscious is important to know our limitation.Ethics limit. This means limit of actions, our behaviour etc. every people must know what he/she can do and can’t to do or limit of better and worst. The meaning of limit ethics is to make every body have responsibility of his/her action.Existential limit. This means limit of life. To know that our life determined by the others, we can’t do anything by our self in our life because we can’t life without the others.

The purpose to realize our limit life is to teach us that in every things we are not always as subject, that do something but we can be an object of what we are doing. As Recoeur said, Who is a man? And Recoeur answer the man is “ The acting, the Suffering being.” And Paul Tillic said, in the man self, we always meet “The limit Situation”. This means one situation can make us to be a rich but we cannot to be a rich man. For example, in reality we can do anything but we can’t do it again because we are sick.So the philosophy of work/task is to determine the courage to be, courage to exist always, and to make our life have a value, and meaning.

Philosophy should create or born a new force to arrive value in this word.We can conclude that philosopher is not a man who knows every things, but the man who learns to knows his/her self, especially to realize their limitation.