Thursday, June 16, 2005

Opening a space

People ask me constantly “what’s the point of all this philosophy?” I’ve been posed with this question so many times I no longer want to smack the person asking it. Smack some sense into them, open their eyes a little. Pick a reason – its there. Because A is doing X to B. Because B doesn’t realize that X also causes Y to C. Every one, every thing, every reason. That’s the point.
I’ll explain.
The Ancient Greeks had this fantastically strange and progressive idea that politics was philosophy, and vice versa. It was so ahead of its time that they were eventually wiped out and pillaged by their neighbors. Side note: it is said today if the great library wasn’t burned to the ground, we’d all be driving flying cars and living in a much more utopian society right now (but that’s neither here nor there other than to illustrate the dangers of violent conquest over understanding and reason). They had forums filled with men (I didn’t say they had the equal-rights thing down all the way) that discussed the great matters of their times – love, friendship, and virtuousness; investigation of these great matters was to one great end, how to better create civilization in a manner that everyone could be happy.
Now, there are many arguments between the differing schools of thought, from the Pre-Socratics (whom I’m rather fond of myself) through Socrates and all of his inheritors, including all the great minds up to our present time. So it’s not a matter of how they went about this – it’s a matter of the end goal of their work – a civilization (or at least being-in-the-world) where we could all be together, better.
Of course, they all had their downfalls, and eventually their demise – but that doesn’t mean we can dismiss their utopian ideals on their previous “failures.” Strong in body has brutalized the strong in heart and mind throughout history (I seem to recall a fantastic man from Nazareth that was crucified for having some really keen ideas about getting along together). Learning from these ideas and piecing together these concepts might start to show us a direction in where we might start to create such utopias.
This orientation, you might call it, towards utopias is the goal of this philo-sophia, this love of wisdom. However, barbaric forces of single-mindedness are still in essence, stronger and turn the utopian orientation around constantly. We might not be doing it with brute force and outright invasion in a plain-sight expansion of empire (or we might, depending on how you see it), but instead with fixed ideals, black and white reasoning. These concepts are moved along at a feverish pace through the might of global capital, the entertainment industry, and many other transmissions of current-day conceptual drudgery.
Of course, I don’t mean to merely offend with my debasing comments about the current system. Its not the way in which things work that I am currently critiquing though, it is the types of thought processes that have been in place since, well, as far as anyone alive can remember, and are continued and spread through the systems that have sprung up from within that thinking.
I’ll attempt to backtrack here for a moment and give a brief explanation of volumes of beautiful work which should most definitely be read, because I’m sure my synopsis does them no justice.
In this state of so-called success, we are no more successful at beating back fear now as we were when we turned to shamans and priests for our shelter from the scary world. We have merely turned our attentions towards science and technology. The type of thinking that puts absolute faith into something without reason, without effort, and without a truly dissecting dialogue, is a fully dangerous one. This is the type of non-thinking that praises freedom, but utilizes none of it. This type of non-thinking fights in the name of freedom, but demands to be ruled to cast out the shadows of doubt and fear that keep them awake at night.
This is the type of (non) thinking that have created the processes in which we function on a global scale now, and it is this type of (non) thinking that is spread further and wider as a result of those processes that have spawned from it.
So how is it that we can finally get away from the barbaric, freedom-hating, empire of disorientation? Only by escaping this regime can we start to actually think about the types of things that could make us start to realize a better place for all of us.
This is why I hope to find a way to open up a space for thinking. It can be a small space to start with, but any space is larger than what we have now. This space must be free of black and white notions, of the dogmatic doctrine of “science,” as well as that of religion. By gathering in this space we might have a chance to sort out these concepts on an even playing field, without making this transcendent appeal to an irrefutable evidence. This is where we can start to think.
Imagine with me for a minute what something we could discuss there might look like – a philosophy of all. We could talk about Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed along side with Derrida, Heidegger, and Socrates. We could include Hawking in this discussion as well! Without a transcendent appeal, we would have to openly discuss the concepts of each and all in a way that we haven’t been able to before – free from the tyranny of the universal transcendent.
I’m not saying that any of these minds are right or wrong, but many of the above appealed to a transcendent that without would bring their arguments down to that to finally be discussed. Imagine what might happen if people understood these concepts and, through their understanding, started to actually embody to ways of Buddha, the ways of Jesus, etcetera. Imagine the kind of possibilities that we might open up there.
This space, I think, would be infectious, cancerous even. Radical cells that grow at extraordinary rates and start to take over neighboring spaces – expanding that space to that all can be included in the philosophy of all. Only then can utopias even be conceptualized, and possibly might have the chance of being realized.
More on utopias later. Lets start though by creating the space where we can think.

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