Saturday, December 24, 2016

Rationalism vs Empiricism


Rasionalism is a philosophical doctrine to signify that reason is the most vital thing in order to attain a knowldege. Empiricists claim that knowledge is attained through nature with the empirical objects, then rationalists claim that knowledge is attained from reasoning. The reasoning instruments consist of logical principles and logic principles.
The debate around which the rationalism/empiricism distinction revolves is one of the oldest and most continuous in philosophy. Some of Plato's most explicit arguments address the topic and it was arguably the central concern of many of the Modern thinkers. Indeed, Kant's principal works were concerned with "pure" faculties of reason. Contemporary philosophers have advanced and refined the issue, though there are current thinkers who align themselves with either side of the tradition.
It is difficult to identify a major figure in the history to whom some rationalist doctrine has not been attributed at some point. One reason for this is that there is no question that humans possess some sort of reasoning ability that allows them to come to know some facts they otherwise wouldn't (for instance, mathematical facts), and every philosopher has had to acknowledge this fact. Another reason is that the very business of philosophy is to achieve knowledge by using the rational faculties, in contrast to, for instance, mystical approaches to knowledge. Nevertheless, some philosophical figures stand out as attributing even greater significance to reasoning abilities. Three are discussed here: PlatoDescartes, and Kant.
Rationalists argued that like mathematics, philosophy and science can determine absolute universal principles, and then from these proceed to additional truths that will be absolute and universal.  Consider one of Descartes’ central examples which he uses to support Rationalism: two plus three equals five.  If I know this, and also that five plus six equals eleven, then I can put the two together to reason that two plus three (which is five) plus six equals eleven.  I can do this regardless of and prior to experiences with sets of two, three or six things.  Empiricists would agree that “two plus three equals five” is a useful understanding, but that it is true given that we continue to experience it as true, not because reason determines it to be true regardless of experience.  Empiricists argued that, unlike simple arithmetic, philosophy and science are complex and contingent, dependent on time and place, and so cannot prove understandings to be absolute or universal.

Plato

The most famous metaphysical doctrine of the great Greek philosopher Plato is his doctrine of "Forms," as espoused in The Republic and other dialogues. The Forms are described as being outside of the world as experience by the senses, but as somehow constituting the metaphysical basis of the world. Exactly how they fulfill this function is generally only gestured at through analogies, though the Timaeus describes the Forms as operating as blueprints for the craftsman of the universe.
The distinctiveness of Plato's rationalism lies in another aspect of his theory of Forms. Though the common sense position is that the senses are one's best means of getting in touch with reality, Plato held that human reasoning ability was the one thing that allowed people to approach the Forms, the most fundamental aspects of reality. It is worth pausing to reflect on how radical this idea is: On such a view, philosophical attempts to understand the nature of "good" or "just" are not mere analyses of concepts formed, but rather explorations of eternal things that are responsible for shaping the reality of the sensory world.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

Known as the first great modern European philosopher, wrote the first canonical modern European philosophy texts, his Discourse on Method and his Meditations.  He is also known in mathematics for the Cartesian coordinate system (X and Y as two dimensions), a device useful for visually displaying algebraic equations and critical for the later European development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz.  The word Cartesian is used, rather than Decartesian, to refer to things that are of or like Descartes, such as his coordinate system and his dualism between body and mind.
Descartes was born in Touraine, France, a town which has since been renamed Descartes after its most famous citizen.  Descartes’ father was a member of parliament, though his mother died when he was very young.  He went to law school to follow his father and become a merchant, but decided to become a mercenary instead and fight in the 30 Years War “to seek truth“, in his words.  It seems that he did not find truth in law school.  As a soldier, he had much time waiting for battle, and studied mathematics and science in his spare time.  On the night of November 10th, 1619, Descartes had a series of visions that convinced him that the world is a rational and mechanical system profoundly in tune with the rationality of the human mind.  Note that, before Europe received much of basic mechanics from China and algebra from Muslims, Descartes would have little reason to view nature as a mathematical machine.

At first, Descartes intended on writing a book on physics, his Treatise on the World, but in 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for his solar-centric theor, that the earth moves around the sun, a theory found earlier in India and Islamic lands that mistakenly posits the sun at the center of the universe instead of the earth.  Because of Galileo’s troubles, Descartes decided to publish his Discourse on Method instead, and it is today considered the first major work of modern European philosophy.
This caution did not spare Descartes however, as the work was condemned by the Pope in 1663, thirty years after Galileo’s work was condemned and after Descartes’ death, and it was put on the prohibited index of books alongside many others that are foundational for the European Enlightenment. Even though Descartes, like Aquinas, argued that reason teaches us that the Catholic Church is the one true religion, his heresy was teaching that it is reason that shows us this, not the authority of the Church or its connection to objectivity itself.  Descartes remained a practicing Catholic until his death.
As the skeptical philosopher of science Feyerabend notes, the Church did not merely stand for ignorance, but supported the philosophers and scientists whose work did not conflict with its dogmas, as do institutions in general.  As far as the Church was concerned, it was the work of Descartes and Galileo that was in conflict with reason and experience already acquired, matters of debate for centuries between philosophers and theologians within the institution.  If one assumes that the Bible is an authentic record of human experience, and if it appeals to human reason in telling everyone to seek the light and be critical of humanity, it is not difficult to assume that Descartes and Galileo are in contradiction with the science of their day, supported by the institution of the Church, the highest science of the time being theology.

Descartes’ death is famous and unfortunately funny.  For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day, an aristocrat who had the time and leisure to do this.  After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor.  Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted lessons each and every morning at five o’clock.  Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and died.  Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed.  This is similar to Sir Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat and keep it from rotting.  Some Swedes reported that Descartes was killed with a poisoned communion wafer given to him by a priest but the sources on this are questionable and it is likely this story was invented by Swedish protestants.

Descartes’ philosophical writings, particularly the Meditations, drew the reactions of several philosophers who themselves went on to become famous, particularly Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, and Locke.  In the Meditations, Descartes asks: What we can know for certain if it is possible that everything is an illusion of the mind?  Like Avicenna, Descartes concludes that we can be certain that we are aware and conscious.  From this, he proceeds to conclude that we can be certain that our thoughts are our own, that the world is real, that there are things in the world that we can know for certain, and that there is a good and loving monotheistic god who would not deceive us about these things.  Some philosophers agreed with this very much, but did not find Descartes’ argument convincing and tried to come up with more satisfying proofs. Other philosophers who were more skeptical, such as the Empiricists Hume, did not buy it and argued that human certainty is always an assumption.  The two sides of the debate became known as Rationalism and Empiricism.
In a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, Descartes turns from an ancient understanding of causes up in the heavens above, acquired through centuries of charting the stars and the seasons, to an understanding of causes in the mechanics of this world below.  While Descartes argued that a monotheistic god clearly created the world, as reason tells us all things have causes, he was condemned like Hobbes, Newton and others for arguing that nature works like a machine, and once caused proceeds largely on its own.  Descartes argued that the natural world, including animals and human bodies, are mechanical and unconscious, like a mechanical clock and unlike a human mind, and that the human mind and body are exclusively separate, a position known as Cartesian dualism.  The worst consequence of this was that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while still alive to learn about anatomy, and argued that animals do not have minds, feel nothing, and merely appear to behave as if in pain.  In one place, he even argued that the mistaken belief that animals can have conscious sensations is one of the worst obstacles to the progress of science and rationality.

          Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677 CE)

Was born in the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, and was thus Jewish, Portuguese, and Dutch.  Jews had fled from Spain and Portugal to nearby lands during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition of 1536.  If 1492 is a familiar date, that is because it is the year that Christians retook Spain from Muslims, and also the year Columbus chose to leave Spain and sail as far across the world as he could.  While Jews thrived in Spain and Portugal under Islamic rule, often occupying high places in the government, education, science and medicine, the Christians had not yet learned to be tolerant or multicultural.  The Portuguese Inquisition that caused Spinoza’s own Jewish community to flee to Amsterdam happened only a hundred years before his birth.  Some scholars argue that the Portuguese Spinoza family was originally of the Spanish Espinosa family, some of whom fled to Portugal to avoid the Spanish Inquisition while others remained in Spain and converted to Catholicism.  If this is true, Spinoza’s family successfully fled both inquisitions.
Spinoza was not only a philosopher, but also a scientist, mathematician, and biblical scholar, studying the bible critically to understand and interpret it’s authorship, meaning, and historical context.  Spinoza’s views of the bible and its authorship, radical for the time, got him kicked out of the Jewish community at the age of 23, as well as ostracized by the surrounding Christian community of Amsterdam.  Like Descartes, his work was put on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.  He was once attacked as he left the synagog by a man with a knife who yelled out, “Heretic!”, and Spinoza wore his cloak, torn by the knife, for years afterwards as a badge of honor.   Spinoza was one of the first European biblical scholars to question the traditional understanding that the first five books of the Old Testament (for Jews the Torah, the only testament) were not written by Moses.  At the time, they were still known as the five Books of Moses, until Spinoza and others pointed out that not only did the book of Exodus speak about Moses in the third person, but Moses dies near the end, making his authorship of the book quite questionable.  Islamic scholars had noted this problem of authorship centuries earlier.
After being banished from Amsterdam for a brief period and then returning, Spinoza lived as a lens grinder, making lenses for telescopes and microscopes, turning down several teaching positions for a quiet and private life.  Because Spinoza died at the relatively young age of forty four from an unknown lung condition, it is suspected that his death was in part caused by glass dust inhaled while grinding.  He was known as an outstanding producer of lenses, and these were used by scientists in the fields of optics, astronomy and medicine during the European enlightenment as they had been used in earlier forms by Muslims.

After writing several short works on science, theology, and philosophy, particularly criticism of the work of Descartes, Spinoza wrote his masterpiece, the Ethics, which was only published after his death and written in Latin, as was most European scholarship for centuries.  Leibniz, who we will examine next, visited Spinoza and discussed his as yet unpublished Ethics with him.  Then, after returning to Germany, Leibniz plagiarized parts of the work and published them interspersed with his own without giving Spinoza credit.  There are many instances in philosophy, both ancient and modern, of duplicated work that dances on the boundary between illegitimate plagiarism and legitimate influence.  Philosophers often fail to mention names when using ideas in the sequence of an argument.
Although Spinoza was interested in investigation and observation of the sciences, he was drawn to Rationalism via philosophy and mathematics.  His Ethics is an attempt to do philosophy as a formal Euclidean geometric proof.  Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician proceeded from assumptions and principles to deduce conclusions that necessarily follow.  While Euclid did not have equations, he worked systematically much in the way that mathematical and logical proofs work, and Spinoza attempted to follow Euclid’s method to make his thinking rigorous and sound.  This is why he is known as a Rationalist, falling under the same heading as Descartes.
Central to the work, Spinoza attacked Cartesian dualism and argued that mind and body are inclusively one, not exclusively two, an anti-dualist position known as monism.  In ancient Indian, Greek and Chinese philosophy, the idea that all things are one beneath and beyond human judgement is known as philosophical monism.  For Spinoza, there is only one unified reality, which he identified with God as Being, and any complete difference or exclusive separation is human ignorance and misunderstanding.  Each individual thing, including minds, are like a wave on the sea.
According to Spinoza, nature, the world and all of Being is God, a pantheist position that infuriated the traditionally religious and got Spinoza barred as a heretic by both Jews and Christians of Amsterdam, who believed God to be separate from and superior to the physical world.  Just as the Gnostic notion of a world ruled by Satan, removing God from the world entirely, was deemed heretical to the orthodox, the opposite pantheist view, that the world is identical to God, was deemed likewise heretical.  According to the Jewish and Christian orthodox position, God rules the world as its separate superior.  In the same vein, right wing evangelical Christians in America today have taken to attacking the environmental movement as satanically inspired pantheism, a heretical worship of nature rather than of a god that created nature but is separate and distinct from it.
Spinoza argued against the immortality of the soul, which helped to label him a heretic.  Like Jains and Buddhists of India, Spinoza believed that the self ceases to be a separate individual thing at death, but, insofar as one has come to identify with and know the whole as oneself in life, one lives on as the whole itself.  Unlike Jains and Buddhists, Spinoza did not believe in stages of reincarnation.  In an early episode of the Simpsons, Bart sells his soul but then regrets the decision and spends a day and night tracking it down.  His sister Lisa tells him that some philosophers believe one is not born with a soul, but earns one, as he did.  The writers are likely thinking of Spinoza.
Spinoza believed that reality is one substance with all particular beings linked together by chains of causation.  Spinoza was a determinist, and believed that there was no real freedom or chance in the universe.  The will and mind of God was not the personal care of an emotional being with a personality, but the causal workings and design of nature.  Reason reveals the necessary causal connections between things.  Spinoza argued that human beings, like Descartes, believe in free will because they are aware of desires but do not understand the reasons behind these desires, and so they perceive the gap as freedom when in fact there is none.  Spinoza noted that people who are driven by passions, such as the baby seeking the breast, the cruel boy who lashes out at others, and the drunk who seeks more to drink, all feel that they are free because they do not understand the forces that determine their actions.
Just because there is no free will does not mean that human beings have no degree of control over their actions.  Understanding the causes of one’s behavior and situation with reason gives one greater ability to act in various ways.  If one has a greater exercise of reason, one will naturally be determined to take a better path that one may not have been aware of before.  An individual who knows they are hungry is free to eat a sandwich rather than punch random people or burst into tears, but the past entirely determines whether the individual will choose to make a sandwich or not.  In this sense, one gains freedom by reason, but much as immortality is not immortality for the individual but the individual conforming to nature, so too is freedom not freedom for the individual but the individual conforming to nature, becoming more capable.
Scholars have noted that this is similar to Daoism of ancient China and Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome.  As we become more active, we become the universe, the sum of all activity.  Like the Mutazilites of Islam, who believed that God is reason and the necessary logic of all being, Spinoza was committed to the position that God is not free to be illogical or be contradictory, but as the sum of all activity this absolutely determined being is the sum of all freedom.


Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716 CE)

Was a German philosopher and mathematician who, as mentioned, invented calculus at the same time as Newton and we still use his system of notation.  His first job was as an alchemist’s assistant, then he became a lawyer’s assistant.  As also mentioned, he met Spinoza, and though the two disagreed on much, Leibniz is known to have borrowed, possibly plagiarized, parts of Spinoza’s Ethics.  Leibniz published little during his lifetime, and to this day no definitive collection exists of his various and disparate writings.  His most famous writings are his Monadology and his Discourse on Metaphysics.
          Leibniz invented the binary system still used by computers today, which may or may not give way to something else like quantum computers in the near future.  Leibniz was a sinophile (one who loves Chinese culture), studied Chinese thought, at least that which was available to him, and invented his binary system inspired in part by the Yi Jing divination system, the ancient Chinese binary divination system that represents all possible situations with solid and broken lines just as Leibniz’s binary system represents all numbers with ones and zeros.  Leibniz was communicating with Christian missionaries in China, and he, like some of the missionaries, believed that Europeans could learn much from Confucianism that was in line with Christianity.  Also an admirer of the Chinese abacus, Leibniz was one of the most important innovators of the mechanical calculator, an early computer which employed his binary system.
Like Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz believed that God created the world as a rational, mechanical apparatus.  Because of this, Leibniz famously argued that this is the best of all possible worlds.  As God is omniscient, God was aware of all possible worlds before creation, and chose this to be the created world, so it must therefore be the best.  Of course, many who ponder the problem of evil, the theological problem debated for centuries about how suffering in a rational world is possible, would question this assertion.  Like Spinoza, Leibniz tried to come up with pure deductive understanding of the world.  Unfortunately this meant the world was very unlike how we experience it.
The infinite, the eternal, is for the mathematician Leibniz an infinite series of distinct points, not a unity beyond all division as it is for Spinoza.  These are the elementary particles of the universe, eternal and indivisible, like the atoms (“without cut”) of the ancient Indian and Greek atomists.  Unlike the ancient Indian and Greek atoms, however, Leibniz’s points are individual minds he calls monads.  This infinite plurality is entirely made of mind, yet they are many exclusively as opposed to Spinoza’s anti-dualist monistic God-mind.  It seems as if the minds perceive each other imperfectly, but in actuality they do not interact.  Each is its entire universe.  In what Leibniz calls a pre-established harmony, each monad was set apart from the central monad, God, and when the monads split and became individuals, they were set in motion such that they could all run independently but seem to share a universe and interact.  Space, matter and motion are subjective phenomena, not objectively real.  Notice how this follows Descartes insofar as all can be doubted other than mind, and that mathematics is given as true by virtue of the essentially quantitative nature of being.
While there are similarities to Descartes, it is also similar to Berkeley the idealist, who thinks reality is God’s dream, and we are dreams within the dream, except in this case, we are each having God’s dream, but separate from God and each other, each privately having the same dream but not contained within a single dream.  Rather, each dreamer is derived from the original dream, each an individual dubbed copy.  Notice that for Spinoza and Berkeley, there is an underlying identity with God which allows the individual be eternal, while in Leibniz, it is the underlying complete separation that allows the individual to be eternal, unlike any substance, which is an illusion, but like the original mama Monad, and like the infinite nature of the endless series of numerals (1, 2, 3…).  It is also similar to Indra’s net of the Indian tradition, a net of mirrors that all reflect each other, a metaphor that Leibniz uses without referring to India or Indra.
There are several principles Leibniz draws upon again and again.  One is the Principle of Identity, also known as the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): If a statement is true, then its negation is false, and if a statement is false, then its negation is true.  For example, if the statement, “Leibniz is a logician” is true, then the statement, “Leibniz is not a logician” is false, and vice versa.  Kant and Russell, advocates of logic and the principle of noncontradiction, studied the work of Leibniz intensely, advocating this principle.  In contrast, Hegel argued in his Logic that all things work by way of contradiction, of tension between opposites.
Another central principle of Leibniz’s is the Identity of Indiscernibles: If two things are without any discernable difference, then they must be not two things, but identical, the same single thing.  Of course, if two things are in different locations or exist at different times, this is a discernable difference.
A third principle of Leibniz’s is the Principle of Sufficient Reason: If something exists, there must be a reason why it exists the way it does.  Leibniz, a Rationalist, believes that the world was rationally created by God, who controls all in this best and most rational of all possible worlds, and so he assumes that each thing can be rationally explained because each thing was rationally created.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804 CE)

In some respects, the German philosophy Immanuel Kant is the paradigm of an anti-rationalist philosopher. A major portion of his central work, the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, is specifically devoted to attacking rationalist claims to have insight through reason alone into the nature of the soul, the spatiotemporal/causal structure of the universe, and the existence of God. Plato and Descartes are among his most obvious targets.
For instance, in his evaluation of rationalist claims concerning the nature of the soul (the chapter of the Critique entitled "The Paralogisms of Pure Reason"), Kant attempts to diagnose how a philosopher like Descartes could have been tempted into thinking that he could accomplish deep insight into his own nature by thought alone. One of Descartes' conclusions was that his mind, unlike his body, was utterly simple and so lacked parts. Kant claimed that Descartes mistook a simple experience (the thought, "I think") for an experience of simplicity. In other words, he saw Descartes as introspecting, being unable to find any divisions within himself, and thereby concluding that he lacked any such divisions and so was simple. But the reason he was unable to find divisions, in Kant's view, was that by mere thought alone we are unable to find anything.
At the same time, however, Kant was an uncompromising advocate of some key rationalist intuitions. Confronted with the Scottish philosopher David Hume's claim that the concept of "cause" was merely one of the constant conjunction of resembling entities, Kant insisted that all Hume really accomplished was in proving that the concept of causation could not possibly have its origin in human senses. What the senses cannot provide, Kant claimed, is any notion of necessity, yet a crucial part of our concept of causation is that it is the necessary connection of two entities or events. Kant's conclusion was that this concept, and others like it, must be a precondition of sensory experience itself.
In his moral philosophy (most famously expounded in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), Kant made an even more original claim on behalf of reason. The sensory world, in his view, was merely ideal, in that the spatiotemporal/sensory features of the objects people experience have their being only in humanity's representations, and so are not features of the objects in themselves. But this means that most everyday concepts are simply inadequate for forming any notion whatsoever of what the world is like apart from our subjective features. By contrast, Kant claimed that there was no parallel reason for thinking that objects in themselves (which include our soul) do not conform to the most basic concepts of our higher faculties. So while those faculties are unable to provide any sort of direct, reliable access to the basic features of reality as envisioned by Plato and Descartes, they and they alone give one the means to at least contemplate what true reality might be like.


References
  • Bonjour, L. 1997. In Defense of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521597455
  • Carruthers, P. 1992. Human Knowledge and Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198751028
  • Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Descartes, RenĂ©. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052128807X
  • Kant, Immanuel. 1969. Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith, trans. Bedford Books. ISBN 0312450109
  • Kant, Immanuel, 1998. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Mary Gregor, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521626951
  • Markie, Peter. 2005. "Rationalism and Empiricism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved September 20, 2007.
  • Plato. 1997. Complete Works. John Cooper, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Press. ISBN 0872203492
  • https://newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Rationalism
  • https://ericgerlach.com/moderneuropeanphilosophy2/



Life and The Afterlife


What is life? The first time you arrived, the first time you breath fresh air when you were born to this world. There must be lot of things come across your mind when I said ‘Life’, because  you are alive and spend the rest of your life in this earth. You think, you see, and you feel.

But what about the afterlife? 2 simple words: Heaven and Hell. Both start with the same first letter but totally different meaning. No one think, no one see, and no one feel what it’s like there  then comes back to earth to tell you a great story.

But i’m gonna start off with ‘Life’, some people think that life is a blessing and some of them think it’s a curse. I’m gonna be honest with you, no one really has only one thought whether it’s blessing or curse. Why? Because in some stage of life people go through both of them. When they are incredibly happy they say ‘Thank god my life is so blessed’, but when they extremely sad they say ‘Crap, I’m bad luck’s favorite’. Then when you mess up with something you yell to God like this, ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ That is Klise, happens to everyone in the middle of ups and downs.

There is one thing that can make a difference to ‘happy or sad’ thing, it’s the ‘meaning’ itself. The meaning of life you’ve been living to for a minute or even thousand years later. I find myself in the toughest situation when it comes to something meaningful in life. But I do find some great quotes from the people that exactly understand how precious this life is.


“Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired, go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.”

 -Bruce Lee- 


At the moment I was in a dumbest brain situation, I laughed hard when I looked at this quote. I thought, ‘hey it’s not that bad being ordinary’, but the next five minutes I realized I was wrong. I lost the meaning of what Bruce Lee actually said. The key to this quote is ‘passion’, the first sentence told to be ordinary and nothing special, but the fact is that he told us to be extraordinary. That ‘ordinary’ needs an ‘extra’ so that you can find a passion in life.

The second sentence, ‘eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired, go and lie down’. how many percentage do you find simplicity in this sentence? The answer is 100%. Those are daily activities common people do. The meaning of this sentence is about doing outside the comfort zone, do something different, something you’ve never done before so that you can find out what big changes happen to your life.

Last sentence, ‘The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand’ Yea I confess, I was the ignorant for five minutes, only five and not more. The wise will accept how Bruce Lee explains that life is so precious, no one should  waste every second of it.


“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”

-Thomas A. Edison-


As you all know, Edison invented a light bulb, and it shows that his ideas is as bright as his invention. He definitely proved anyone he’s a genius with all those ideas and inspirations. But who knew that Edison used only one percent inspiration, where are the rest of them? Yep, he used ninety-nine percent for perspiration. According to a science dictionary, perspiration is the production of fluids called ‘sweat’, and what’s sweat has to do with it? Because not only inspiration that made huge changes for Edison’s life, but also the hardwork. No matter how much sweat, he kept on going through failures in order to create a perfect light bulb. His hard work has finally paid off,  he got the answer, an invention for all human being in this world..



“You never know how strong you are, until being strong is the only choice you have”

-Bob Marley-


This is clear to me, Bob told us in order to live a life you gotta be strong, and it is clear that life is never easy. You need a power to turn yourself into a strong person, where in some point you’ll hit a weakness spot. And when you hit that, there is no choice other than trying to be stronger and stronger, like trying to build a muscle in your defense. You can also hit a gym if you want to, literally..

So, everyone has their own way to express the meaning of life. Bruce Lee tells about ‘Passion’, Thomas Edison tells about ‘hardwork’, and Bob Marley tells about ‘Defense’. What else can you tell? There are lots of meaning that hasn’t been discovered yet, you just have to widen your perspective, open up your eyes and realize they are everywhere.



Now let’s talk about the afterlife..

When you’re dead, your soul is going somewhere called heaven or hell. I mean that’s all we know from most of religions. The question is, do you believe it? For me, I do. Both heaven and hell is the most crazy idea as well as human beings existence in this earth. Why I call it crazy? Because none of them has logical explanation..

Heaven, a place for good soul that consists of light and happiness. There are oasis around the heaven, clear skies that you can touch everytime, fresh fruits that would never be empty on a bowl. And maybe, earth is the last time you see the darkness. That’s picture perfect of Heaven.

Hell, a place for bad and sinful soul that surrounded by darkness, the sound of thunder rumbling towards ear that no one would ever wanna hear. Hot fires everywhere waiting for the soul to be burnt into ashes.

What really matters about Hell or Heaven is the faith itself, because you can’t expect to travel there like a road trip, go when the sun rises and comeback when the sun sets, then tell people how amazing your experience seeing a waterfall on sky, or do a selfie next to a Hell’s guard and post it to instagram. That’s not how it works. Once you leave this world, there’s no turning back. So having a strong faith in this eternal thing is essential. But it’s up to you whether you wanna believe it or not. Or maybe you’re still confused thinking about where the soul is going to when you’re dead. It doesn’t matter, take your time. But I’ve got a quote telling us about the faith on this eternal matters..



“Aim at heaven, you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you get neither.”

-C.S Lewis- 


My perspective on this quote is actually about believing in the afterlife. Lewis told that believing in Heaven is something that he must do in order to have faith to do the good things. It is true that once you aim at Heaven, you will always try to do your best in every steps in your life. You’ll always try to consider what’s best in your life by doing good things for you and for people around you. And when you aim at earth, it gets you blinded. Most people try to reach happiness in the way they see them in an ‘earthly mode’. What’s an earthly mode? Basically it’s about ambition on how people get most of their happiness by fulfilling their wants and needs. Sometimes both of them can be deceiving, you just need play it smart to make a difference between what you want or what you need.



So, the conclusion is still up to yourself, but for me, life and the afterlife are both very important things for faith. Because I can’t separate anything when it comes to them, they are connected. When a person says he doesn’t believe in the afterlife, but how about real life? The answer lies deep down inside you. J