Is philosophy a waste of
time and space in an existential
crisis? Suppose that you wake up one morning only to find yourself stuck right
smack in the middle of some kind of a complicated game with a mindboggling number
of players, a game that stretches off way beyond all the horizons of time and
space and imagination; and suppose, equally, that you have memory neither of
how you got into the game, nor of the precise number or identity of the other
players, nor of the rules of the game or of its goals. Let us finally suppose
that you decide at some point in this waking nightmare that you are not particularly
comfortable being enmeshed against your will in this bizarre game, but then you
also somehow realize that you do not have the power to just up and quit and to exit
the playing field or the Game (—death is no exit; simply another of the
infinite doors in the labyrinth-game!).
So you have no idea what is at stake in this little game
of impenetrable rules, and yet you have no choice but to continue playing.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone
of Life-Itself – you are on a journey neither sought for nor desired, only to
discover that the road map for the remainder of the trip got left behind in
some long-past highway rest-stop.
Where to go…? What to do…? How…? Why…?
Myriad are the tales of rovers
in these “foreign” parts we call Life-Itself.
Homer, for example, in the Odyssey, tells us the
stories of the travels and woes of one of the most well-known wanderers in
human memory: Odysseus.
[1] Tell
me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he
had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw
and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon
the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even
so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore, for through their own
blind folly they perished—fools, who devoured the kine of Helios Hyperion; but
he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess,
daughter of Zeus, beginning where thou wilt, tell thou even unto us.
[11]
Now all the rest, as many as had escaped sheer destruction, were at home, safe
from both war and sea, but Odysseus alone, filled with longing for his return
and for his wife, did the queenly nymph Calypso, that bright goddess, keep back
in her hollow caves, yearning that he should be her husband. But when, as the
seasons revolved, the year came in which the gods had ordained that he should
return home to Ithaca, not even there was he free from toils, even among his
own folk. And all the gods pitied him save Poseidon; but he continued to rage
unceasingly against godlike Odysseus until at length he reached his own land.
Tennyson, Poet Laureate of
the United Kingdom, beautifully rendered the obstacle-laden Homecoming (Grk. Nostos)
of this ancient Odysseus into a Ulysses
well fitted for the 19th century, a wanderer who, in the absence of the gods, was
driven onwards by the swells of his own Wanderlust.
I
cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life
to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly,
have suffered greatly, both with those
That
loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through
scudding drifts the rainy Hyades2
Vexed
the dim sea: I am become a name;
For
always roaming with a hungry heart
Much
have I seen and known; cities of men
And
manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself
not least, but honoured of them all;
And
drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far
on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.
I
am a part of all that I have met;
Yet
all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams
that untraveled world, whose margin fades
For
ever and for ever when I move.
How
dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To
rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As
though to breathe were life.
Life
piled on life
Were
all too little, and of one to me
Little
remains: but every hour is saved
From
that eternal silence, something more,
A
bringer of new things; and vile it were
For
some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And
this grey spirit yearning in desire
To
follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond
the utmost bound of human thought.
Another wayfarer, the
omniscient narrator in Dante’s Inferno (Canto I), finds
himself lost in the Middle of Life, and tells us of his journey through the
spiritual realms, until he finally “finds himself” found again.
Midway
upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
We are presently living
through a period of human existential crisis, with the result that any significance
we might attach to our personal passage through the world of Man-existing derives
primarily from self-defining, closed interpretive systems—from philosophizing.
Such journeys as those described above, and these celebrated travelers, can therefore
become roadmaps, and these travelers pathfinders, for each one of us; and if we
allow them, if we find the way to make sense of the echo of their voices in the
hallways of our own labyrinth, they will become road markers for us modern
wayfarers, indicating obstacles for us to avoid, desirable attitudes to
cultivate, or not, and helping us to choose out for ourselves from among the
almost infinite variety of possible goals that we may freely adopt at one time
or another during our own Life-journey.
If this analysis is in fact
accurate, then all the resources of Philosophy and Poetry, which are attendant
handmaidens in the service of Reason and Inspiration, and which help us to
think about and make sense of our Life-journey, can never become exhausted. So
as a means of making sense of our world and our journey through it, Philosophy,
both as discipline and art, must never be abandoned—that is unless one means to
give up entirely on the various interpretive possibilities of human reason and
enlightenment. Let it also be clearly said, however, that Philosophy is
incapable of yielding just One Single Response/Interpretation of the world upon
which all men will agree to hang their hats—rather, it is an ongoing
conversation with many layers.
Philosophy in this
existential period is fairly persuasively and therefore fairly firmly grounded
in the idea of the Subjectum, the
cogito, the “I” of Descartes;
all other metaphysical ground (read: religious grounding) has been pretty well stripped
away—for better and for worse. So it would seem that the “I” who is the
Wanderer in this wasteland would be a pretty reasonable philosophical starting place
to begin thinking about the World-Life.
An initial philosophical intuition on the part of some of
the earliest thinkers in this modern existentialist period, e.g., German
Romantics such Winkelmann, Höldelin, later Heine, etc., and more philosophical
types such as Schilling, Hegel, Nietzsche, et al, was to look back into the
period of the ancient Greeks in an attempt to discover an original experience
of an original world of men as yet unpolluted by centuries of religion. The strong conception common to these thinkers
is that the world of men is tragic (although a variety of different
explanations is given in an attempt to explain why this is the case…), and that
therefore the experience of men in this world will be defined by Leidenschaft or suffering. From this
tragic conception of world and life would also bloom the fine flower of an idea—that
the life of the individual is a Work of Art, and that we are all artists.
The canvas we paint of our lives is therefore our own.
Other streams of Philosophy will evolve along other lines
of tradition, such as the empirical tradition first articulated by Aristotle, and
which will eventually give rise to the 18th & 19th
century Empiricists like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill, and then the 20th
century Popper; then there will also be the various traditions of (Anglo-American)
Analytical Philosophy, developed by Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, et al, which
will include philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics,
and logical positivism. This is Philosophy in her incarnation as a
pseudo-empirical science.
Another persuasive application for Philosophy during the
journey of our lives is in trying to discern and to decide how the self can,
may, and perhaps should act in the world. This application, popularized of late
by the French philosopher Pierre
Hadot, also harkens back to the philosophy of the ancient Greek period in
order to re-articulate in and for the modern period the Stoic or Socratic life.
Finally, Philosophy also contains all the elements and
tools of enlightenment criticism … so we can, and should, bring all the might
of our human understanding to bear critically upon all the bigger questions
that interest the individual “I” in the labyrinthine world of men, in this Twilight
Zone of Life-Itself. Questions, for instance, concerning what Men should hold
sacred, and which touch upon culturally taboo subjects such as:
1.
The received
traditions such as religion
2.
The culturally
determined ideas – such as State, patriotism, etc.
3.
Of methodologies
– science
So, what to do during a journey
that you neither asked for nor desired, a journey through a savage
(intellectual) wasteland where each step must inevitably be your own? Take a
big breath, and Think Big Thoughts… because you cannot be any more lost than
you already are.
