How has scholasticism impacted your society?

Answer 1

I think I would say we now look to academics for answers, rather than ourselves or religious authority and it ended up dividing people by arguing different viewpoints, without coming to an integrated philosophy, even if the early scholars were trying to reconcile different world views. Meaning is left to scholars and they have reasons for not agreeing, just as scientists compete for grants or others for power. Different schools ended up in black and white thinking, as usual. Psychology defines black and white thinking as a mental illness. Perhaps scholasticism has almost become schizophrenic instead of leading to enlightenment and a synthesis.

How confusing is it to see so many competing philosophies, religions and scientific and political views for examples? One person I knew, trying to get a doctorate in philosophy, said that he was literally going insane and had to quit. I don't know the end of the story. I hope he made sense of it all. You have to sift through everything and make up your own mind. I have only been reasonable successful at doing this so I see much merit in all viewpoints and errors too.

Just physically alone, we all have to have a somewhat different view of things, if in only that we can only be in one place at a time. But freedom is being able to move into different situations and different situations require different philosophies, rather than one size fits all. If everything is absolute, than different absolutes come into play in different situations.

Scholasticism may have degenerated into educated idiocy rather than enlightenment. You have to go all the way through the different disciplines, let alone the different philosophies, or get lost in the woods and who has the time? I suppose we now need a philosophy that brings together all philosophies and peoples, but that has its traps also. We have to be always learning, but not in so divisive a manner. We have become very polarized and judgmental, or, so open as to be at a lose for words. Integrity may be the ability to see a pattern is the chaos that we sometimes see in the lose of authority, while following authority seems to be to take on one particular short sighted view of everything. I guess we have to become our own authority, if we are reasonable enough about it.

I suspect that by using our intuition, we can see the order in any situation. Science is now saying that whole brain thinking, which is mostly vision logic, is so much more objective. Even Aristotle knew, that without intuition, we were only rationalizing a viewpoint and not thinking at all. Maybe the final impact of all the confusion will be our ability, and absolute need, to use intuition to make sense of reality, as we tire of thought 'leaders' who can't possibly think for us all. That's the best comprehensive answer I can come up so far.