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CARDINAL SIN OF PROPHETIC INTELLECTUALS


Our intelligentsia is deeply immersed in wishful thinking, which is certainly producing half naked half clothed intellectual with no sense of sensitivities towards reality. They're self-declared, self-contained prophets, anxiously anticipating life-lessons in abstraction, without having any awareness about the multiple colours of lives. The most liberating prophets of our age produced a series web of logics, disconnected from the things in the world. And many accepted them as the truth with slavish acceptance in totality. The danger, in fact, lurks against our civilization, not from innocence of heart and acceptance of darkness, but from the "dogma of knowledge". To know is not a final task, but a process, for one needs to be humble in the acceptance of ignorance (Karl Popper, Conjecture and Refutation).  The only value which seems to be liberatory is the acceptance of limitation, which is the very basis of scientific attitude (Chomsky). Science cannot be, and never have been the final truth, but a means and a set of methods; to doubt (Descartes), to induct (Bacon) and deduct (Popper), to hypothesise, observe, and dissect, to criticize (Popper) and  particularize. Science is the name of limitation. Without limitation, is there any possibility of creation and existence? We all are finite beings with unknown infinite possibilities. Logical atomist like Bertrand Russell rightly articulated, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt" (Emphasis Supplied). Einstein in his lucid remark said, "Two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about Universe". Undoubtedly, a little modicum of doubt is life-saving upon which the Cartesian philosophy flourished in Continental Europe, which was accepted as the foundation of science. Skepticism was inherently foundational in Socratic dialogues and in Hellenistic age, particularly skepticism and cynicism emerged as the philosophy of limitation. We may learn from the history of ideas, that it's better to be skeptical in thought and bold in the practices of ideas. Since, the science of our age is still not so advanced, for philosophy is a good guide to keep the questions alive, for a better world to come. Because, the very method of science is still away from the moral questions. For philosophy requires thinking beings to immerse in discourses, and in its practices, without flowing in the undercurrent of conventionality.

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