The Big Swim

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Hello Jen
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That statement could just as easily come from Lao Tze as from Nietzsche. They were both enlightened and comparable thinkers. Both were accustomed to tread into the murky, trash filled waters of pseudo science and false morality. Both could be found cleaning up the deep swamps of superstition. And they would enjoy swimming in the oceans of creativity, imagination and inspired thought.

I read both of those philosophers as well as others who have avoided the ankle deep mud puddles of tinsel intellect and waded into the deep. The most exciting part of any study that takes one into serious water is that the inspiration for ardent, progressive thought comes from the unmet and unknown community of thinkers. It is why the enlightened ones need to write and be published. Even though any language is limited in its ability to translate supreme ideas into words and symbols, the attempt to do so and the accompanying challenges from other thinkers to those ideas is what creates the commerce of ocean dwelling men and women and the sharing and gradual focusing of immortal light on the truth.

To me, in my advancement into the senior class, there is hardly any human activity more interesting than the market place of ideas as it is found in philosophy, art and science. To identify a controlling principle through understanding its expressions and to trace individual experiences, mental and spiritual, back up to a dominant principle is an ever exciting journey.

The world of pond and brook dwellers tend to think of advanced intellectuals as ivory tower types who live in a world of isolation from other thinkers. But that's a false impression. I have often said that as an actor when I see a play or a film I am watching other actors working. I know a difficult scene when I see one and I can admire how a good actor engineers his way through it. The same can be said for musicians listening to other musicians playing or artists at an exhibit of paintings. There are some fundamental ethical, psychological and metaphysical questions that all philosophers must approach at some point in their work and how they engineer their way through the questions to a proposed answer is fuel and food for another thinker. And thus the big swim continues.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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Consciousness Chart 9/16/09

Question: How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?

DB - The Vagabond
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Welcome to my room.
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In my eager younger years I wasn't much interested in philosophy. I got my intellectual stimulation from music and the great playwrights. At one point I read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" because everyone was reading it. And. yes, I read the whole thing. People were put off by the fact that it was so long. But Rand was a Russian and the Russians wrote long novels. Look at Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. How many people got all the way through "War and Peace"? I did. I also read Doctor Zhivago even before I saw the movie. But I digress (as usual).

Philosophy itself, unencumbered by fiction, was an alien world to me and I expected it to stay that way. I took one philosophy course in college taught by a fellow who was more interested in driving his Thunderbird and playing his cello.

Somewhere I acquired a copy of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" which I found boring and confusing. I also couldn't find anyone with whom to discuss the ideas in the book.
So I gave up philosophy for good.

Then many years later I happened by one of those dollar-a-book tables on the sidewalk in New York City and bought a book that changed my life; "What Is Called Thinking" by Martin Heidegger is an edited series of lectures he gave in Germany about the processes of the human intellect. It sounded to me like the perfect book to put me to sleep. But instead, it woke me up. It changed my light bulb.

Now I'm not suggesting that everyone should go out and buy this book. It just so happened it was the one that did it for me. Then I read all the philosophy I could get. Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant, Rousseau, Descartes, Russell, Arendt, Santayana, Sartre, Locke, Mill, Goldman, Dewey, Spinoza, the list is very long, and, yes, Hobbes is on it.

Nietzsche says somewhere that philosophy is not designed to tell you what to think but to get you to think for yourself. For me now, it's the great adventure. From a subject that put me to sleep it has become the one that threw aside the covers and tossed me out of bed.

They don't all agree with each other but they all think, challenge, reason, huff and puff their way up imposing mental mountains and poke their noses into every corner of life from geraniums to galaxies. Far from being dull, it's a restless world of confrontation with ideas, histories and all the phenomena of our lives. I would like to live another hundred years just so I can read what these amazing men and women have to offer me.

Question: How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Any one of them can do it if you're in the dark.

DB - The Vagabond
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May you find happy blogs to read.
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