Early Horizons of the Mind

 

When the child asks us if all the birds that live in Spain are Spanish, he doesn't understand that, although the question is syntactically well formulated, it contains semantic fields that are not coherent with each other, or more precisely, that it contains concepts that do not belong to the same semantic system. Nationality is not an attribute applicable to birds.

Many philosophical questions we ask ourselves from the perspective of everyday life (the Lebenswelt), from the vantage point of the world and everyday thinking with which we uncritically construct our concepts, are analogous to the child's question. Since its origins, philosophy has paid great attention to the definition and semantic delimitation of concepts, starting with the concept of "concept." This fussiness, often exacerbating for the non-philosopher, while not eliminating all the problems of thinking, minimizes the most obvious ones. In our philosophical discussion, we have seen discrepancies in the understanding of concepts such as "religion," "politics," "pantheism," and "dharma." The fact that our discussions involve people with different mother tongues complicates matters. We blindly believe in the lexicographic authority of dictionaries, something that is even more absurd today than it once was, since the variational dynamics of linguistic pragmatics (the variation in the meanings of the same word or expression in different contexts and life scenarios) are increasingly rapid and less centralized. If we want to maintain a clear discourse on the foundations of our thinking (and I recommend doing so primarily there, and gradually abandoning it as our theoretical construction takes shape), let us begin by clarifying the foundations of thinking. I know it's not the most fun thing to do, since we want to think directly about the richness and complexity of philosophy—that is, the complexity of the human mind and soul—but it's the only way to avoid getting bogged down in misunderstandings and absurd arguments that won't get us anywhere.

Before asking whether pantheism is a religion, we must clarify what religion and what pantheism are. Furthermore, we must also clarify what we mean by "something (whatever it is) exists."