The Blackberry Walk

I remember when I was younger and when I first got into philosophy. How old must I have been, fifteen, sixteen? The so-called 'hard problem of consciousness', as the scientist-types like to call it, felt like a piece of grit in my eye, making my scientific view of the world a poor lens, uncomfortable and hard to see through. How could, I thought, the world be made up from top to bottom of matter when consciousness is not material? There's something paradigmatically different about consciousness. It exists prior to the existence of matter, since my perception of matter is contingent upon it; you could almost argue consciousness is more real than the matter it perceives. My thoughts ran along thus. From these Kantian and panpsychist interests, I found Jung, and after Jung I found Christianity. That piece of grit in my eye had in time become a pearl. But what of philosophy, that vehicle that brought me along this journey? What is the object of philosophy, and what is its point? And is philosophy good? The questions raised brings to mind a Chesterton quote - of course - specifically his quote on open mindedness. 'Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.' The image painted here is beautiful. Imagine the open-minded man, taking every view into account, and viewing an issue from every angle, standing with his mouth agape like some mouth-breather. The effect of philosophy is much the same. Philosophy in of itself is a tool of open-mindedness, a tool to break down a status quo, and bring about a new way of viewing the world. A dynamo for Western civilisation, perhaps. But a motor spinning wheels without a destination. In mediaeval times, philosophy was understood as the hand-maiden of theology, because the scholars of the time knew philosopher hasn't an end-point. The end-point was the Lord, and philosophy bolstered His Glory through the understanding of Him through reason. I'll give you another Chesterton quote - I'm feeling generous today. "The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether." What seems to us humility in being open minded is to lose sight of our aims. And the man without aims is directionless. Imagine your aim was a flag which you are trying to reach, and each time you think you're getting closer, the flag moves. You'd be walking in circles your whole life! Philosophy is but a tool, since it can't present to us what a good end looks like. Many like Kant extol a system of morality, a set of moral dicta; and they may claim that these dicta originate from some great chain of reasoning they've scribbled down. But let's be real. It isn't. Most philosopher's, like Plato, don't 'follow the science', they have a cool idea in their mind and they come up with a justification for it. Hegel no doubt was the same. However cool, however applicable, the dialectic may be, it is but a flight of fancy to elevate it to the point of godhood and make it a metaphysical principle. The egos of these men! Looking back to those first great egos, Socrates and Plato, you begin to realise that their claim to mere 'love of knowledge' is bogus. Plato sets himself apart from the sophists of the city as something different, as someone who just wants to 'follow the science' and be led by reasonable arguments. Today, in a time of industrial propaganda and jadedness, it's easy to see through the bluster. We can see these arguments which Plato puts forth are a means to an end, that end being the viewpoint he wants to propound, rather than just following pure reason from its seed to its fruit. And just as Christ says, that by their fruit you shall know them, so too can the teachings of Socrates be seen through the fruit of their students. See Critias who led the Thirty Tyrants, a ruthless and bloody oligarchy after the Peleponnesian war: Critias was the fruit of Socrates' teaching. A generation of students were brought up to think for themselves and question everything, including the venerable traditions with which they were brought up, and the morals they were given from their youth. Athenian society was crushed. Philosophy wasn't a tool to find truth, but rather one to break tradition. This sentiment is expressed excellently in The Clouds, a play by Aristophanes lampooning Socrates, and is an invaluable contemporary relic for understanding the forces of the age. In the comic play, the protagonist of the story goes to learn with Socrates to become a philosopher, hoping to get rich quick after racking up gambling debts. He fails to learn from Socrates since he's too thick, but his son, who had also begun to learn at Socrates' Thinkery himself, became a star student. In the finale of the play, the son claims that since parents may hit their children to discipline them, children ought to be able to hit their parents also, and then proceeds to beat his father senseless. Aristophanes plays with something profound here. Socrates' Athens is a place where the young teach the old, where the inexperienced ""educate"" those of experience, and where the sense of tradition and the sense of hierarchy are smashed. Law and order, out the window. There is no order, only chaos, when the mouth of open mindedness is left open. My argumentation against philosophy so far has been on its aimlessness and its self-deceived sense of just following truth. My third argument is however different. I think the very primacy of philosophy as something preceding and underpinning all other discourses is wrong. The argument goes as such: all belief systems and ways of viewing the world can be collapsed into logical assumptions, metaphysical assumptions, and epistemological assumptions; and that between different ways of viewing the world, philosophy offers a kind of lingua franca between beliefs, between which one philosophical system can communicate with another. The idea that philosophy is behind everything, I reject. This is because the world isn't built upon logical propositions. Such a view of the world, I believe, is foundations of sand. The mysterious, apophatic nature of reality is such that logical priors can't do it justice. In fact, seeing the world through logical propositions and reason is a very limited view of reality. Reality is to be touched and tasted, not thought about a read about; and greater still participated within in the sense of personal change and becoming. Not logical priors. But you may say, dear reading, BreadIsDead, you are just drawing upon a Wittgensteinian notion of epistemology. And yes I am. You can't get away from philosophy in the written word, since philosophy is a way of expressing these ways of experiencing the world and ways of life. The difference is, there's no need for philosophy to have a privileged position as the sole way of communicating a lived understanding of the world. Why can't art do the same? Stories, paintings, music, dance, have all been ways in which cultures for generations, including our own, have passed down ways of thinking and experience. Why do we privilege philosophy over these as modes of expression? Because of its precision? Because it activates our analytical left-hemisphere, in an era of left-hemisphere dominance (if you believe in such theories, or accept their mythic power). There are means of understanding which are right-hemisphere, which involve the mind in a different way, and can bring perhaps a deeper understanding than mere words. Whilst the communist worldview was brought about through philosophy, the fascist worldview certainly was not; yet both worldviews provided ways of understanding the world, however dogmatic they could be. Philosophy is fire. Misused and propelled, philosophy can turn an ancient woodland to ash in a generation. Fire cannot create, it can only change and destroy. And that is what philosophy has done in Western civilisation to great effect. The landscape has been burnt down many a time, fertilising the soil each time for a new way of being to grow in its ashes. Is this so wrong? So much has been gained from Plato's project, so much learnt. But philosophy is now a dog without a leash. Untethered from God, who gave ends to philosophy's means, philosophy has lost a master to serve. In the past, philosophers had abstract notions of God - Hegel had some conception of God, and so too did Kant - and these ideas as to what the ultimate and the divine look like gave direction and meaning to their scribblings. The participatory experience of the saints gave philosophy as falsifiability. And in modern society, as nascent paganism looms, the reader of much modern philosophy is led on a winding path, steep in ascent, up that philosopher's very own Tower of Babel. But insofar as philosophy is destructive, art is constructive. We can learn so much from that most undervalued member of Plato's triad, Beauty. Whilst Beauty must be tempered by her sisters Truth and Goodness, for there are sirens leading each astray, Beauty will invite you to her sisters and teach you implicitly what the philosophers cannot. I look back on my own journey, expressed at the top of this article, and I see very little philosophising occurring. I never thought deeply about ideas, never reasoning through to logical conclusions: I followed the ideas which looked cool, which spoke the most to me. We imagine our own philosophical journeys, but how much philosophy does each of us on those journeys do? How much philosophy from first principles did Kant do? Or did he have a destination he wanted to find through pure reason? It's dangerous to fall in love with your own ideas; the pride will consume you. Philosophy has no praxis to combat pride; it's impotent as a spiritual or religious force. It has no aims, and it doesn't merely follow truth. It isn't the bedrock of thought; it is the drill which mines through the bedrock of thought, collapsing the edifice. Wisdom doesn't require philosopher, for there are 'lovers of wisdom' of every stripe.