State of enlightenment

Hmmm, for some reason, not much has been rattling about my head recently. I think I've reached a state of enlightenment, where I really couldn't care less about a lot of things. Does that count as enlightenment?

Come to think about it, how does a person actually reach enlightenment anyway? After all, the classic methods don't seem to work. The more you meditate on life or whatever, the more problematic it seems to be. The solution appears to be withdrawal from the world. Sounds like escapism more than enlightenment to me.

Let's start by considering the meaning of being enlightened. If we define it as a state where more knowledge is attained, then a great many people are enlightened these days. After all, I'm pretty certain most modern academics have more knowledge under their belts than Buddha did in his day. Quality, not quantity, you say? Well then, that becomes a completely nebulous concept. How do you define the quality of knowledge? Which particular item of knowledge is more valuable than the next? Take an example, say if I had to choose between knowing how to play soccer brilliantly and how to build a working nuclear reactor. It would seem that the latter would be more valuable, but to use a positive measure, the former is worth far more. How many nuclear scientists do you see who make more money than their counterparts in professional sports? I can't think of another neutral method of assessing the worth of this knowledge. If this is the case, then David Beckham is pretty enlightened.

Unless you're a complete moron, you will realise that the last statement is patently untrue. So we are stuck. Enlightenment as knowledge cannot work unless we have some way of measuring the value of knowledge. This seems to be pretty easy for most people. We pass judgement quickly and unthinkingly on the quality of particular realms of knowledge without pausing to make a decent assessment. For example, most people will agree that a philosopher is somehow nobler than an economist. Now, why would this be the case? Assuming both have similar qualifications and levels of achievement in their fields, how is one realm of study superior to another? Because one makes more money than the other? Using that criterion, the more money you make, the less your knowledge is worth. Pretty counter-intuitive if you ask me. Applying that to different areas of knowledge breaks it down fairly easily.

Say you have two businessmen. One specialises in staplers and the other in manual typewriters. Both have equal levels of knowledge about their markets and products. The stapler peddler makes a ton of money, because everybody uses staplers, and he has the market cornered. The typewriter fellow also has his market cornered, but makes far less profit, because nobody buys manual typewriters these days. I think it's easy to conclude that knowledge of the stapler market is more valuable than knowledge of the typewriter market in this case. But that runs counter to the economist making more money, presumably, than the philosopher, but being deemed as possessed of less valuable knowledge.

Ah, but you cry, the businessmen used their knowledge in an external context. That knowledge would be useless without a society in which to sell these things. We must consider the value of knowledge in itself. Well, I say knowledge has no intrinsic value. There is no such thing as any item of knowledge that has a value in and of itself. The philosopher's knowledge is only valuable if he can apply in the context of himself, society, divinity, or whatever it is meant to apply to. What sort of philosophy has no grounding in anything? All knowledge requires some assumptions. Without assumptions, no thought can occur. Assumptions may run from society being sui generis, to sensory perceptions. So knowledge must be taken in context.

Discarding the idea of knowledge having intrinsic value, how may we assess the value of knowledge in its context? Things get more complicated here. As philosophy may be judged to be immensely valuable in the thinking of man, isn't economics equally important to society, if not more so? After all, economics affects people in a very direct way. Far more people find economics to be of greater interest than philosophy than the other way around. The average man on the street will probably be able to tell you something about labour economics or money supply, even if only in terms of how unions operate, or something of the like. Ask him about Aristotle or Descartes, you would be unlikely to get any details at all.

So people despise economists for dealing in a science which they find useful and interesting, but glorify philosophers for studying something that is interesting only as an abstract concept? Most people will probably tell you that philosophy would be a more interesting field of study than economics, but how many have actually tried it? In any case, I'm pretty sure that many economists find their studies to be as interesting as their philosopher counterparts.

Thus far, I have discounted monetary reward, influence on society and interest as yardsticks of the value of knowledge. What else is there? I cannot think of anything at the moment, but my point here is that it is presumptuous and lacking in merit to try ranking knowledge by value. There doesn't seem to be any way of defining the value of knowledge that makes sense and is applicable across all fields.

Quantity and quality of knowledge have been cast aside as the definitions of enlightenment. So perhaps it is a state of mind. That is the point of meditation and all that jazz, right? To achieve an altered state of mind. If so, then those drugged out hippies of the past century were right after all. Being stoned is akin to being in a state of enlightenment. What is the desired state of mind anyway? To think of nothing? To think of everything? The former can be achieved by slipping into a coma. Everybody should just find a way to become brain-dead. The latter is impossible. No one is omniscient. If you are, then good for you, you've just become God. It is simply not possible, because no matter how much you do know, and think about, there is an infinite amount of information you simply do not have. How many people in the world have sneezed in the past second? How do you know that? Maybe enlightenment is simply to think about more stuff than other people, in a different way. In that case, many smart people have reached a state of enlightenment.

Look, I'm not saying there is no such thing as a state of enlightenment, but I am saying that there doesn't seem to be a way of defining it. As such, I don't think it's possible to actually accurately realise that you are in such a state, since we cannot really know what it is. If there were no borders, how would we know which country we were in?

I started out tonight tapping randomly because I couldn't get to sleep. I think I'll go back to trying.