There is a mystery element within our consciousness that we are unaware, objective categories manifest within the mind itself which bind to the very subject of experience. Before Kant rise to prominence, David Hume distinguishes our innate ability to recognise the causation of objects as uniform repetition closest to determinate truth. Still, he left out the question of the medium which brings the cause and effect as a unified proposition. How is it possible to cognise the concepts of causality in the first place. Immanuel Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber after reading Hume. Shaken into a state of limbo for 13 years, before publishing his magnum-opus, on the Critique of Pure Reasons, changing the trajectory of philosophy towards a new era.

Hume lived in the period of the enlightenment where (to put it simplicity) the stage of philosophy battle is between the rationalist and the empiricist prevails. Hume would position himself as a sceptical empiricist, qualifying as one of the big three on the side of the empiricist. He dismisses the rationalist as too abstract and un-practical. Our imagination is too limitless, able to access into the realm beyond the universe in our mind and travel into uncharted chaos. But we need to ground ourselves back into reality.

Confucianism is a philosophy practised in the East, written obscurely by Confucious himself and his student as a guide to the Way of the Tao. The reason for his obscurity is that the interpretation of the writing is multi-dimensional; each point is in relation to each other. I’ll take my hermeneutics from the book, A guide for the perplexed, quoting from the author, Yong Huang, a liberal view on Confucianism. I’ll draw comparisons from the Western philosophy to make some distinction as well.

What does it mean to be free? First and foremost, it is a word, obviously, so it must come from somewhere. According to John Locke political theory in the Age of Enlightenment, Liberty is one being free from a superpower. Adam Smith, grandfather of economy, based his entire economic theory on individual liberty. Even in the bible, the concept of liberty run strongly to the core, embedding in the logos, a spark of divinity in every man. This appearance of Western thought runs through the veins of every free individual. So strongly, in fact, it is manifested in The Bill of Rights. How unthinkable to even reject it through reason when it is Western history itself.

But even the impeccable concept is still intangible ideas. Look at Eastern Philosophy, trace back to Confucius teaching. The Western notion diffuse and differs. Men here in the Orient are men as a community. To take one’s self-interest is the same thing as the regard for others. Egoism and Altruism combined. Combined not in a way that virtuous person is partially egoistic and partially altruistic but both simultaneously. Personal and Politics circulating as one in terms of virtue ethics of the synthesis between Egoism and Altruism, that is the role of the government in the East, different from the liberal view.

To learn and understand the foundation of roots is to alienate from one’s manifestation. How am I to feel indifferent about both views. But the external is binary, to make a choice between one-another. No longer in the state of paradox left in the mind. To choose one is to reject the solid ground of an empire. How am I to decide? To view as the eye of Horus staring down at the pyramid. Now we have a split, between the above and the within, the minority and the majority, the master and the slave. Pick a side, through the guidance or multiplication.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) tackles the question of experience. Not ordinary experience but dialectical experience in our pursuit of absolute knowledge. The Introduction is simply a short preliminary conception, only justifiable by going through the entire book. By searching section by section, digging into the text, contemplating and re-contemplating, discovering and re-discovering, can we understand Hegel (and any book) to the fullest in a dialectical sense?

But look… still we have to start somewhere. So here’s an attempt of an introduction to the Introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

There are places where we put ourselves in mentally on the idea of how we want to live our life. There is order; the place of comfort, the walls of culture, the perception of how society portrays your role according to your demographics, psychographic and ethnographic factors. Then, there is chaos, which is the land that lies outside the boundary of order. It is the place where the potential of exploration will take places. The area that elicits fear and curiosity.

Here’s an analogy to what I’m saying to visualise. You are on an island. The island is your reality. The things that lies within the island may or may not be enough for the capacity for living. And there’s the infinite ocean that surrounds the island. It is infinite because you cannot see the end of it. Therefore it is infinite. There are times where you don’t notice the ocean. There are times where you look at the sea, but the fear of exploration stops you. The fear of drowning. There are times where your fear is replaced by curiosity, and you step into the water. Everyone has their island, in different mental places.

The information that you feed yourselves is the foundation of your order, the sand below your feet. The island of order can shink and expand depending on the information you have so you move accordingly if you don’t want to drown and fall into nihilism. You have the move voluntarily; otherwise, you won’t move and you sink slowly and drown in your own reality. It a justified but sad way of living.

The question I want to contend with is that of human rationality. First, we have the define our terminology. What do we mean by rationality? I lack the knowledge of the philosophical perspective of rationality so I need to catch up on that in the future, but let us define rationality in terms in game theory. There are several axioms in game theory, but as a summary; if I get to choose between $1 and $2, I should pick $2 … obviously. The same logic should be applied to other scenarios or object with our initial logic. There might be a few problems here. Is this the same as Aristotelian’s logic? And what is the evolution of logic theory? Does the example suffice?