Bring'em Young — And Then What?
Bringham Young
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
— Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 BC)
The titled responsion is a play on words, bring them young, to Utah that is!
Does this make Utah the strongest single state in the good ole US of Eh? The statement is questionable and yet, Diogenes's wisdom persists? Why is that? Despite the circular reasoning and play on words, the fact of the matter is younger generations are the future. Obviously.
In a deliberate attempt to keep this light and stay far from the clichés like, "youth is the hope of our future" vis-à-sis one particular Filipino writer; José Rizal. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to judge, I mean José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda is considered a national hero in the Philippines. I will leave it up to the reader to consult the Google oracle and discover for yourself what particular dollar bill José's likeness appears on. I will give you two guesses. ;)
Better yet, you could check out the following film based on the true story of Rizal's imprisonment and the final days of his execution.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Okay, so we have state executions, the corruption of the youth and a website full of philosophy. Sound familiar?
The corruption of the Athenian youth was the charge levelled against Socrates and to my knowledge, Diogenes said nothing about Socrates. He did, however, respond to Plato when Plato defined a man as "featherless bipeds," Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man," and so the Academy added "with broad flat nails" to the definition.
How would you apply Fideism to the issues of Academic Freedom that surfaced in the 90s around fundamental Latter-day Saint doctrine? Sound knowledge understands the difference between Reason as independent from Faith versus Reason as synonymous with Faith — the Thomas Aquinas variety.
To make things more complicated, or interesting, Immanuel Kant’s famous suggestion is that we must “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”, which is part of this same lineage. What counts as "education"?
For me, the approach is one of make-believe, I have an incredible ability to form abstractions that I have ever experienced. Notice how I saved myself from conceit only to land in the land of solipsism? And I think it's a worthy exercise to consider that, for the most part (o sepi to poli), we can only truly experience our own sensory perceptions in full experiential wonder and awe.
To bring it back to Diogenes and his tradition of the Cynic, the counterfactual imagining that you must now consider, because I "command" you to do so, is to juxtapose these two schools of thought in a harmony of sorts. An aesthetic (not anesthetic) arrangement of your imagining.
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Daniel Sanderson