Politics, polemics, philosophy, and policy

Its been a long time since I've written about anything political or philosophical in a non-academic manner. Its difficult to traverse the gap between the ideal world where people understand the nuances of your conversation and wish to improve upon it by adding and refining, to the actual world where people would rather in many cases simply cut you off at the knees to spare them another from walking.

So I guess I should explain myself, introduce myself, or whatever else needs to be done. My point in my life, my writing, my actual career, my academic career, etcetera, is towards a realization of being-together-in-this-world. It might sound a little quirky, but hear me out.

Every single person must share with every other person many things; We share water, air, space, culture, and understandings. These are compulsory, natural - we don't try to share these things, we just do. The people upstream throwing their trash in the water effect our water, and the factory sixty miles away effects our air. All human understanding is created in-between-us (a few of us know this as the intersubjective agreement) - there is no understanding within you that isn't created externally, between all of us.

I know this is a quick and dirty, so I may revisit this concept a few times. Anyways, back to the point...

Being-in-the-world-together remains a deep concern for me because I look around at the natural sharing and being-together that takes place and find that it contrasts deeply to the borderline misanthropic and severely cynical way of life that many seem to exude. I am not without guilt of this either, of course - I have had vehicles broken into, people pick fights for no reason- people lied, cheated, and stole from me just to get ahead - on many occasions. Its very easy to fall into the contemporary way of looking at things with a hardened heart.

The greeks looked at politics and philosophy as one in the same, philosophy (philo-sophia, the love of wisdom) created their policy, and this philosophy was one of a philosophy as a way of life. These days, most people view philosophy as a waste of time - all talk without any doing. This is not my intention at all. If it was, I would be the greatest hypocrite.

Philosophy should be lived, should be embodied, and therefore should influence all of our actions, including the ones involved in our political actions.

Well, enough to begin with.