the only easy day was yesterday

Monday, January 28, 2008

what is philosophy

a dauting question. i think it best starts from how it arises. in all people who i have ever experienced as being interested in philosophy i have noticed that it comes from dissatisfaction. when youre unhappy with the way your life is going you look for ways and reasons by which to make things right. then you find philosophy. it gets complicated here because we see that it does arise out of despondence about ones life, but when we discover philosophy it turns into a different beast. i operate under the presupposition that philosophy is the most base study of being a human being, yet when i look at the things which i study daily, they are far more concerned with the unsolvable mysteries of metaphysics and epistemology. is tryin to understand the way of being of a human being unphilosophic, or do many philosophers have it wrong. its just become too small of a scope. somehow the study turned into schools of thought and this and that. humanity was sucked from it because the entire history and influence of philosophy was sort of built around objectivists which i think misconstrues the nature of the study. certainly they have an argument but it narrows the nature of the study down too far. i think it better studied within the scope of understanding what it is and what the nature is of our being. all studies evolved from philosophy, general interest in the basis of how we operate and inquirys into life in itself.

so really im not going to lay claim that what i believe within it is correct, but rather that it is an extremely expansive study which needs no definition, just people who are interested in any area or inquiry into life. rather what i think its important to say is that philosophy rises out of being disengaged with life. philosophy arose as a study in a society that gave its citizens the leisure with which these people could use to sit and think and get bored enough with life and manipulate their thoughts such that it created the ideas that first formed philosophy. it arises out of being out of yourself; man as a hunter-gatherer had no philosophy because they had no time for language or thoughts that frivolous; they were involved in staying alive. once we cease to live within our experiences and have the time to take the proverbial step back, then we come to these questions.

so i suppose the question arises: can philosophy logically be a study of life if in order to participate it we must stop living as fully as we could be? are we really taking a step back when we think we are, or are we just being as subjective to our own view of the utility of the world?

3 comments:

The W said...

i think this concept of a "full life" needs to be elaborated upon.

The W said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7212698.stm

Jasper Yate said...

i didnt mean living fully like the cliche sense. i dont mean living life with the right balance of thought and pleasure, or whatever...

you know how when youre int something you don notice your into it. like this, you may just be on auto pilot and reading this now really into it (because im such a great writer of course), and only noticing that you were totally involved with it now that i say it. its like watching tv or a movie that goes quick. ive heard it being called 'falling into' something like falling into work or play or something.

thats sort of the sense i mean by living life fully; not in some sort of pedantic way, but rather in a way that we are involved with whatever it is that were doing. this is opposed to philosophically minded things because i have to sit here and think about what i am being and in order to do that i really sort of have to stop being as much as i can and start observing my being.

now it comes into play that we cant ever stop being in the way that we are being, we cant ever step outside or be objective, so the question arises of whether we are actually as involved as we ever were when we think about a priori knowledge beause we are simply being just in a different way than we are when we play halo for 15 hours straight.

i just heard a great joke: "eli manning is a good quarterback..."

HAH!