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Why Read Philosophy? 1 (Meta-Philosophy) Why read philosophy? (of original and –creative thinking rather than derivative, academic, professional philosophers) Ulrich de Balbian Director Meta-philosophy Research Center 1 Bereft of all feeling, deprived of all passion, devoid of sense, robbed of its humanity and stripped of any humaneness ‘philosophy’ had become when in the hands of mostly anglo-saxon, so-called analytic ‘philosophers’ and mostly white, male, seemingly confused, elderly , ‘continental ‘philosophers. The passion that drives the thinker through the Socratic questioning are forgotten and the slight glimpse of a vision of the golden dawn now and then revealed in Heidegger by the lover of wisdom are replaced by pseudo-logic aspirations and sterile mathematical notions of those who produce an infinity of peer reviewed articles and endless writings to fulfil the contract of their tenure as paid, professional thinkers who must produce on the academic assembly-line of living off ‘philosophy’. We are left we the bare bones of semantics expressed by the semiotics that are reflected by the norms of reasoning and some form of, usually informal, logic. Why do philosophy, why grasp, approach and ring out the blood from almost anything, any thing, any thought, and why read every word and grasp its wrestling for meaning with the philosopher who tears them out of his heart, cleansed by his mind, why try to tune in to his stream of consciousness in an attempt to share that what he tries to catch a fleeting glimpse of and express by means of ideas, words, concepts, phrase, propositions, statements and sentences? We read philosophy so as to tune into the life, the existence, the passion, the fear, the dread, the occasional delight and happiness felt by the thinker wrestling all day and all night, like Jacob, with THE ONE. We will not let go of the slim hold we have on the tunic of the Beloved until, with the seeker we arrived at knowing intimately the one, the one real self, our real SELF, the Sufi Beloved, the Gottheit or Godhead of Meister Eckhart and the long line of 1 2 mystical lovers. This is what the reader discovers when he attempts over and over and over again, to grasp what Heidegger is trying to uncover, what those like Socrates and Hegel attempt to reveal – that what gives meaning to life in spite of all its pain, its dread, the violence of war, the anguish of rape, the hurt of a loved one murdered, the child ripped away out of the mother’s arms by the all-equalizing one, the grim reaper. We seek the few fleeting moments of tranquillity, of inner peace, all contemplatives seek and that a few original- and creative-thinking philosophers occasionally get hold of by means of flashes of intuition in their consciousness and struggle to find suitable words to express them in signs that reveal them and make them visible, known by means of intersubjective tools – to anyone who seeks passionately, who wishes to listen to the almost silent voice of reason. Attempting to enter the thoughts, the consciousness of the lover of Sophia, the yearning after her wisdom, is the prize of the lover and seeker of absolute intimacy with Sophos. The thinker who engages Sophos allows us to share in his most intimate embrace his Biblical knowing of his Beloved – this is what the one who reads philosophy realizes – the poetry of the lover singing the beauty, truth and meaning of the Beloved. The reader is allowed to enter this secret chamber and being led by the words of the philosopher can, almost as if s/he himself is the lover employ the philosopher’s words to re-create his thought and sing out the poetry of the love of wisdom. THIS is why one reads philosophy. To share the intimacy the thinker expressed in words, his oneness with wisdom, the reader is allowed to trace through every word, every thought, every movement of consciousness and thus s/he can himself become one/d with the Beloved grasped and held, beholden and revealed by ideas, by reasoned thinking, not unlike the midwife pulls out the bits of meaning by means of dialogue in ancient Greece. Many aspects of what the original-and creative-thinking philosopher reveals and allows us to share by the intersubjective means of language, concepts, signs and consciousness crystalized as words, appear not unlike poetry. Like the life experienced by the poet when she says something about the rule for living a life, as Mary Oliver in her ‘instructions for living a life’, shares with us, with those who wish to listen - Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it! 2 3 Why read philosophy, why write philosophy, why do philosophy, why philosophy……. It is the need to struggle to get hold of some of the meaning of life, the passion to make some sense of the fleeting moments I, we, one spend on this planet, earth confined, in a seemingly vast, endless, often hostile reality and universe. 3 4 My painting of my, now deceased, dog (bottom right) in the mist under a tree in my garden. 4 5 5 6 6 7 Why read philosophy, why write philosophy, why do philosophy ….it is like you stick, force your hand, your arm deep, deep, deep down into your most into parts, through your pliable brain, into some dark, endless Freudian hole and pull out handfuls of mass, formless mass, and then the first signs of some meaning are forced into that mass, through deep pain you produce some initial meaning as shown here in images, my visual art – the initial step, then this so-called intuition are slowly transformed into concepts, gradually constituted into the forms of meanings, clay, paste, damp formless dough are sculpted by simple signs into intersubjective meanings… isolated thoughts that gives shape to formless, imageless intuitive grasps for meaning, for sense.. and slowly in spite of the severe pain they are given more recognizable shape – the concepts that begin to make sense, the first seconds of visible forms on the first day of creation, and scalpels of logic are sliced into them to make them meaningful by giving them a reasoned appearance – these are the products presented in a more ordered, reasoned form by means of visual shapes and perhaps, eventually as arguments – arguments to present to the reader the ordered, formerly shapeless intuitive mass of sparks, are forced into concepts, propositions, statements and birth is given to isolated insights of sense and gradually compelled by the force of reason to sentences of sense. This is what, the end result, the reader is shown, 7 8 this is what the reader takes hold of, simple words and try to follow them up to get hold of what the philosopher has tried to express and communicate. 2 Some, hopefully the most important aspects of the most relevant, subconscious, pre-conceptual, experience have been brought to conscious awareness as the stuff of intuition and jotted down in some verbal, visual, diagrammatic manner. Now the philosopher attempts to retain, with as little cognitive bias as possible to identify the relevant features of this intuitive awareness and try to constitute them as some form of conceptualized mind set, in the most open minded way or manner as possible. Much of so-called Continental philosophical ideas concern this stage of pre-conceptual awareness and the beginnings of conceptualized consciousness. When these things have been brought more explicitly into verbal or conceptual tools and arranged in some logical form by means of reasoning or arguments we arrive at the areas where so-called analytical philosophy often are the preferred approach. At this stage the philosopher begins to do things with words, reasoning, logic of some kind, arguments and argumentation – ways to construct his mind set, frame of reference and cognitive contents in a visual and most often a verbal form. The latter is what the reader of philosophical material is presented with. That is where he might find the string of meaning that he is to identify and grasp, hold on to and follow through the darkness of non-sense, the cave of ignorance, to the light of meaning at the other side of the tunnel. This is how he attempts to lock into the verbally crystalized or conceptually expressed strings of ideas of the philosopher – if they make intersubjective sense and are presented in inter- subjectively meaningful and logical ways. These are the strings of meaning the reader, who becomes the co-thinker in the dialogue, hold on and follow, in so far as they are meaningful, reasonable, rational and sound – if his cognitive attitudes and biases, experience, knowledge and level of understanding allow it. In the so-called Socratic methods of doing philosophy we see the ideas being explore, identified, shown and revealed very gradually by the interchange of words of those involved in the discourse. Words are not merely uttered in an objective manner but are meant to represent, depict and make visible not only the thoughts, but also the underlying attitudes, values and norms of those producing them. They depict the mind set, the reality, life world and consciousness of those who use and utter them. With the result that when these words are being modified, the logic they are being used in terms of 8 9 and the reasoning they express are identified, made explicit and altered the associated beliefs, mind set, values, state of awareness, attitudes,, existence and life of the individual are being transformed – hopefully into a more meaningful, a more reasonable, a more rational, moral and human one.
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