Burke’s Blog

If you want to know the truth, you want to know “what is.”  True things have existence.  False things do not.

All of us deal with the question of what is, all day long.  The student tries to find the truth of the math problem (“What is the answer?”), the attorney hopefully ponders, “What is justice?” and the doctor seeks to discover “What is the cure?”  This is the question at the root of our own existence too – “What is life?”

But simplify this even further and just ask the question, “What is?”  This is the beginning of true philosophical thought and the beginning of a more meditative and satisfying life.

“What is,” actually has two opposites: “What is not” and “What ought to be.”

Positive Analysis

The positivistic world is the world of science and any other discipline that use science primarily as its base. It is this world that seeks the difference between “What is” and “What is not.”

For example, a scientist wants to know the truth about an object being acted upon by another object or an exterior force.  The scientist wants to know “what is” the measured outcome.  This is proper to science, because the scientist should not be allowed to presume “what ought to be” the measured outcome.  This would be adding bias to the experiment.

Modern economics is one such discipline that narrows down “What is” to the opposite of “What is not.” If you had a fast food restaurant and wanted to maximize profits, you would ask yourself “What is it that people want?” And if the answer is a cheap sodium-saturated fatty meat on a cheap, processed bun that tastes good upon chewing then that is what you would sell.  If you were to ask the question “What ought to be what people want” you would discover that leaner meat not laden with hormones and preservatives would be what they ought to want.  But you would not make as much money by giving people what they ought to want, only what they actually do desire.

Normative Analysis

The normative stance on “What is” differentiates between what is and “What ought to be.”  This is the approach of the man who, upon seeing the world, decides that he will pick up where God left off, who participates in creation by turning nothingness into something, disorder into order.  This is the realm of artists and Saints, and it should be the realm of political leaders (many politicians, unfortunately, are more focused on the business and science of getting elected).

Normative philosophy has been pushed to the side because it seems too religious.  But the people who are doing the pushing aside are, in actuality, setting their own norms, declaring that we “ought” to only think in positivistic terms.  It is a self-contradiction.

I am not suggesting that I know precisely “What ought to be,” only that it should be discussed more often in the public arena.  How would we come to an answer on such a difficult question?  First of all, people need to read the wealth of dialogue that has been passed down through history that is not on TV, not even the History Channel.  I recently got rid of cable and network TV, and I recommend that same step to anyone who is serious about discovering what ought to be.  Also, look at the natural world around you closely – not by yourself, but with others.  Start to ask each other what is and what ought to be.

True things have existence.  False things do not.  What ought to be does have existence, but we cannot see it clearly just yet.