Vladimir Gradev
Editor-in-Chief of the Philosophy journal
https://doi.org/10.53656/phil2025-01-01
One of Kafka's parables allows us to better understand the paradoxical metaphysics of contemporary communication. "They were given the choice of becoming kings or the king's messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless." Voices are constantly mixing together and though they carry more and more information, they manage to transmit no content, and since none of the messages' authenticity can be confirmed, the meaning of every message is naught. Information overabundance turns out to be hollow and worthless, for it can never be traced back to a concrete source. The parable implies the need for a higher authority, but makes no mention of who asks the children about the choice of their vocation.
What use do we have for philosophy, if not to help us find a good application for the messages without the need of a "king" behind them, but also without, while searching for the truth, only finding ad nauseam one truth after another, each one just as hollow as the one before? Philosophy shows us the road from awareness to knowledge by explaining where the problem comes from, what it consists of and how it develops, and by healing the metaphysical wounds opened by communication, which are caused by confusions of language and terminology; the road of the ways we look at the world and, in doing so, let the view keep us prisoners of the prevailing spirit of the era; the road of technical rationality's confidence in the fact that there is nothing that cannot be calculated and controlled; the road of media doxosophy and of ideologies' ready answers. A philosopher is truly philosophising when they are not content reflecting on their own time, but seek to make it more understandable along with the previous and future times, and most of all when they succeed in showcasing the fact that thinking is an action, that it is the first and main form of our doing. To a great degree, the efforts of the Philosophy journal's authors are concentrated on exactly this.
Communication and Philosophy
Prof. Vladimir Gradev, Dsc.
Sofia University
Faculty of Philosophy
E-mail: vgradev@phls.uni-sofia.bg
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