March's Blog-- Is philosophy a waste of time and space?

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;

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 18^th & 19^th century Empiricists like Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill, and then the 20^th 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.