Dig Out The Truth

Things don't turn up in the world until somebody turns them up.


President James Garfield
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Hello Frosty
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James Garfield, Republican, was the 20th President of the United States. He had a long and active career in politics before narrowly defeating his Democratic rival for the Presidency. Unfortunately he was the victim of assassination shortly after taking office.

Garfield once said that the best university is a log, with you on one end and your professor on the other. These days it would probably be a park bench, but the image still holds true.

I once read a book in which a professor gave a final exam to his graduate student while the two of them were riding in an elevator. If both professor and student know the subject thoroughly the right questions will bring the answers and once the answers are known the questions become unimportant. As Susan Sontag wrote "The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions."

I loved to read philosophy, which calls itself a search for truth. In many ways however it is the search for questions. The right questions may provide the right answers. Socrates' persistent dialogues with his friends uncovered, turned up, many profound questions. But did they provide all the answers? I would say evidently not because philosophy didn't stop with Socrates or Plato.

Philosophy continued through the Roman, Greek and Arab civilizations, the Jews and Catholics of the Middle Ages in Europe on into the Age of Enlightenment, and on into the Modern World where there are philosophers in every country pondering the same old questions and turning up new ones.

Long may they dig.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
No. 1,896
Never Give Up

Unreliable Understanding 7/13/09

Don't believe everything you think.

Unknown
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Hello again.
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There are too many questions. I think I know answers. But I don't believe it because every now and then I have to throw out one of those answers.

It becomes a very frustrating thing to face infinite ambiguity as one's mind opens up to realize how much we don't know. Even the most courageous thinker will give in to that frustration sometimes and decide something is true without challenging it. We all come into any level of consciousness with a bag of ideas from the past; opinions, prejudices, simplicities, rules for this and that activity and behavior confuse us and hold us in tethers.

One of the things about the mind is that, like the heart and lungs, it never stops working as long as we're alive. But how much control do we actually have over what it does, especially now that we know that some if its activity is unconscious.

If you commit a crime, if you kill, wound, rob, rape, damage property, slander, a court will decide if you did it and what your punishment is. But the court has no jusridiction over your thoughts. If you have thoughts of rage, hate, revenge, lust and other negatives you may never carry them out, because of you own sense of ethics. And you may say "Oh, I would never do anything like that." But you are having the same thoughts as the felon who did. So what, after all, is the difference?

Then these questions arise. Where do these thoughts come from? Do I own them? Do they come from me? Are they from my imagination, from some collective unconsciousness or from some diabolical mental swamp? Those are questions that have been puzzling philosophers, psychiatrists and theologians for a long time. And have they come up with any solid answers that they all agree on? Not as far as I know. I know what I think. But I don't believe what I think. What do you think?

DB
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Let the sun on you, or the rain, whatever nature gives.
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