A Product of Your Time?
(How) Can We Transcend Our Historical Context?
Leo Strauss says, in Persecution and the Art of Writing, that philosophers have more in common with each other than they have with other members of their society or culture, even when they disagree fundamentally about the most basic questions.
Philosophers, in contrast to everyone else, are time-travelers, or time-transcenders.
Do you agree? Would you grant other groups beside philosophers this time-transcendent quality, such as artists, religious thinkers, or innovators?
Or is Strauss too romantic? For instance, it is the shared experience of some technology, say, democracy, or the printing press, or dental care, or the internet, smart phones, etc. that defines people, and not anything trans-historical?
If you aspire to be more than a product of your time, how would you go about learning how to do so?
Strauss is right. I call time traveling 4th dimensional being. Philosophers share the element of being able to connect past, present, and future, regardless of current technology and social practices. Think of the most basic philosophical inquiries: logic and language, mathematics and science. When philosophers investigate these subjects and develop insights into them, the discoveries can be applied anywhere and anytime. This is what makes philosophy appealing and useful regardless of who practices it, where they lived, or when they wrote/spoke