Aesthetics
What most appealed to me in philosophy as schoolboy was the freshness and strangeness which adolescence consists of and to see this mirrored in the Greek Philosophy: Greek philosophy as a whole inseparable: from its mother culture: its Acropolis, its marathon, its plays, its oracles, Pinder, Aristophanes... When one meets philosophy early on in one’s path it is indeed a ‘blessing’. Still, this young person will never quite make it back home. The blessing falls to those who would follow philosophy, would follow its muse. The blessing is to see things in wholes as in painting and wholes within wholes, such that when one sees the forest floor in early spring, it is a perfect grasp of the essence, in a mood or feeling of music, this understanding is the philosopher’s main preoccupation. The philosopher looks around at other people and wonders why they are not enthusiastically pursuing philosophy as well, instead they are met with scorn and mockery for searching after the truth of being. It is altogether odd.
Still “those who seek, find,” Jesus always spoke in truths. If you seek, then you will find. ‘Find’ mirrors ‘seek’. Or another way of saying this: “seeking is finding”. The honest pursuit qualifies as its own achievement. But if ‘seeking is finding’ then we need to adjust our ordinary view---that is to say, seeking leads to a grasping and holding onto something concerning truth, beauty and God, so on…If ‘seeking is finding’ or ‘finding is seeking’ then we don’t actually get to an “answer” because “answers kill questions”. It is common to seek for a forgotten road, and then coming upon it, at that point the quest is over. The key thing with philosophy is its ‘freshness’ rash, impetuous, undisciplined, teaming with life, and early strains of romance, it doesn’t want to get to the end, or to get to the point when in fact it is always already right there in front of you.
Philosophy is the art of the question. Don’t race to an answer to stopgap, to cease thinking, satisfied. Philosophy is a poverty on the one hand and an incredible lush banquet on the other. So it goes on and around, and this is what drives the “lets play the game of society to the utmost” to anger and in part accounts for the scorn philosophers suffer . We’ve all been there and seen the scorn and often the mockery which the philosopher has to tolerate. And for what? Oh yeah he wants to help them discover the truth! For this he is mocked and ridiculed. We’ve seen the well meaning citizens dishing out their fair degree of stored-up malice, treating the most ethereal ‘space cadet’ with no shortage of enmity and rage. He must take it because he “ain’t goin’ back no more.”
Once onto philosophy it is a habit that’s pretty hard to shake. So, no, don’t worry about the philosopher even though he’s an endangered species---you know like a Dicey-eared platypus…It’s a marsupial, not even a mammal. Don’t worry about that guy with the odd glare, like Aqualung, grubby vermin, Thunderbird swilling…[…]
Yes, this effort to end the dialogue, kills the spirit of philosophy, hence the innate dislike of fussy housekeepers dead set on having meals at the same time, the practice of philosophy is always a ‘persona non grata’ with domestic life. Wives cannot bear it, mothers cannot bear it, businesspeople, men of affairs and practical minded people cannot bear it---I do not simply mean that they will not participate in philosophy, but that they will do everything they can to send it out of doors. In the thousands of tables and kitchens I have visited in my life, there were only one or two which tolerated and even welcomed honest philosophical inquiry without application to “real life”, without application to some contemporary social or political question, without some interruption for work or school or lawnwork. I daresay there have only been a handful of truly philosophical discussions in my entire experience. The philosopher is an endangered species.
The Good Use of Reason
It becomes clearer as we venture further into the future constructed upon technological applications of reason that what worked in a moderate sense and for a time being, does not work when pressed to the limit. For example, yes labor saving devices freed householders from work both inside and outside, and yet, the amount of projects to be done also multiplied. Instead of using the ‘free time’ for recreation or even self-improvement, contemporary man simply works on more projects with the time “won back” with labor saving devices. Further, such things as washer and dryer or dishwasher cost more, and this requires more wage earning. The idea of humanistic psychology failed terribly. I for one was taught that the time won back from ordinary labor tasks would be used for the enhancement of human life. This is blatantly not the case!
It is difficult to argue that life was better in the ‘70s or in any other previous era (“The Golden Era is always behind us.”), but in my view the ‘70s had a lot more to offer in terms of simple decent civility.
The Flight from Labor
American citizens are on the flight from honest, hard work and labor. The use of equipment renders digging holes irrelevant, now the task becomes the rental and transportation of a large John Deere digger. It would appear that the contemporary citizen is lazy, afraid of having to do the difficult work that immigrant laborers thankfully contribute to the American culture. Instead their tasks consist in handling phone calls, programming data in air conditioned cubicles. This we are told is ‘work’! If this is work then every computer user should be paid for simply using their computer since their “work” contributes to the overall emerging structure of the internet.
Leaning on technological strategies for purifying the water we drink, testing the safety of our food, the safety of materials to build our homes, we become a cog in a wheel in a grand culture of conformity to “progress” and technological monoculture. As more and more of our ordinary life is relegated to this type of ‘rationality’, we become dependent (literally) on a monolithic technological expert society, and this is not even the government, per se. That is, it is not democratically sanctioned, to the contrary, it is corporatist, for profit and extremely elite with no polling. It is a ‘plutocracy’.
When we think about the humble and independent roots of American individualism as beautifully stated in Emerson, we find that America 2007 nothing could be farther from being American. These are as unlike as day and night. Whatever obligation may have existed to honor the American government in the past no longer exists, because it is no longer ‘America’ we are talking about.
Show me your independent and autonomous citizens! Show me a man or woman who can think for themselves. Show me a citizen educated in the traditions of his ancestors. What I would not give for freedom of speech as it existed in the ‘70s. Fascist “newsreporters” such as O’Reilly or Sean Hannity mock, deride and rudely insult anyone who would question the state generated view, the official sanctioned ideology . Sometime I will write more about my experience in the Soviet Union in the early ‘80s, when the madman Reagan declared “the bombing begins in 15 minutes.” That made my trip so safe and secure, thanks Ron! At any rate, Soviet life achieved a high degree of moral functioning as I observed. This is the fact the “cold warriors” cannot admit to themselves: the Soviet “experiment” was (despite blatant and gruesome failures) fairly successful in promoting a common cultural and social life which was even law-abiding. Morever it was a bold experiment for which no precedent had existed. The U.S. is not so opposed to communism ideologically, for if they were they would have been better educated in Marxism, as it is wie to understand the opponent. No, the real issue was not communism vs. capitalism but world domination. The Soviet Union harbored a messianic agenda as did the U.S. Herein lies the collision of these governments.
Now that the “bipolar” state of global domination has been reduced to a self proclaimed unipower (NeoCon Preemptive Dogma), it has (lo and behold!) seen fit to assimilate a great deal of the terrible Soviet human injustices while relegating the positive achievements to the dustpan of history (undergraduate American education). Now we have incarceration techniques at high schools, we have ‘extraordinary rendition’, we have ‘political correctness’ (Stalin’s ‘politicheskii pravitelnost’), we have 24/7 propaganda concerning freedom and democracy, while the citizens are dumbed down to be ignorant of the contents of the constitution, we have internal spies, neighbor watch, presidential elections that are rigged, the president speaks in a technological jargon devoid of meaning, waging world wars without any desire to end them, we have more working people spending more of their wages just to maintain what they had before, appalling medical care, appalling standards in the government agencies, Neanderthal standards in education, …need I go on?
As I said, unfortunately we did not assimilate the positive features of Soviet Communism: superior education, idealism based upon truly Christian tenets, and in may ways we can say that the Soviets were toughminded and honest. In the case of the U.S. we want to hold on to the nostalgia and good times feeling of the ‘70s, i.e. as “PR”, while in fact our government performs all of its
atrocities hidden far from view (Guantanamo, Abu Gharaib) while it depicts the president at May Day parades or in classrooms with children and attempts to portray him as human or ordinary or even “American”. In my estimation our government officials no longer deserve to be considered American citizens, since they have violated the essence of democracy with the Patriot Act, spying on citizens, arrest without warrant, to mention a few of their fascist agendas---and not to mention the mad urge to create identification methods for every citizen which unifies every aspect of their communication and shopping tendencies, library books, etc… A veritable fascist panopticon to use Foucault’s expression.
Why are we any further from God now (since He is everywhere and at all places) than in the future?
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