Live Simply, not Petty

a Letter to Tom Martin, Philosophy Chair, University of Nebraska at Kearney

Having once heard a philosopher say, "...a person needs to do something ...in life," I wonder.

Philosophy keeps me awake at night, or perhaps I should say it wakes me up at night, then keeps me awake. You see, philosophy isn't Immanuel Kant, or Plato. It isn't Kierkegaard, Brentano, Rawls, or Quine. It isn't Adler, or Austin, Russell, or Aristotle. It isn't Socrates, Gandhi, or Lao Tzu. Husserl, or Hegel. Philosophy isn't Humanist, or Existential, Greco, or Judeo-Christian. It isn't Taoist, or Zen, Buddhist or Confucian. It isn't Empirical, Cosmological, Political or Social. Nor is it Aesthetic, or Ascetic. It is none of the labels applied to it from every point on the compass of mind, for whatever that constitutes.

It isn't the application of logic, a wholly human perspective from which anthropomorphism springs as surely as we spring from the earth to which we shall return in the course of our short lives. As Samuel Beckett observed, "We are Born, We Suffer, We Die."

Philosophy is thought. Anyone and everyone can practice it, and does. Philosophy is the collective consciousness of humanity in search of definition; primarily a definition of self. Applied through the use of language in often verbose and redundant ways, a commonplace, a typical banality in some instances for all its high-minded intentions. Philosophy is the ongoing madness of a small blue planet.

From the pygmy tribe in the jungles of the Congo, peasants in Rio, or the cosmopolitan New Yorker, it is the dialogue with the inner being. An inner being whose very existence is fraught with fear and trembling at its own passing; the ravings of a soul condemned to death. The inevitable transient nature of self in a dispassionate universe, equal in its impermanence.

It is used to convince, to justify, condemn, and control. Its' warriors, alternately applauded, and shot. We live and breath, we love and die. We build our castles; our monuments to ego; only to watch them crumble in decay. In our best attempts we prolong the demise of selected fragments, claiming small victory's in an otherwise indifferent Universe. Self-congratulatory egos fending off the darkness for another hour, shrinking away in the end.

A time killing device, Philosophy is self indulgence, something to do on our way out the door of our lighted house of life, and into the eternal darkness of death.

For all of this, Philosophy is necessary and integral to us; for all its frailty still, a foundation of sorts, as we attempt the penetration of our own illusions. And this, this necessity for penetrating those illusions is, "...a person needs to do something ...in life."