The Art of Philosophy: Again

The only way to learn philosophy is by experiencing it. Again, this is the difference between rote and process knowledge. The only way to first experience it, or even experience it truly, is unsystematically. Why?

One can research philosophical systems, but systematizing diminishes grand ideas from active shapes to rote tedium. Rote knowledge is not learning, as we've discussed. It is memorizing simply. Students confronted with wide complexity reduced to rote become lethargic and apathetic quickly. Why? Because it doesn't appeal to the rarely used (at this point) part of their brain that needs it and as such bores them. "Why do I have to read this crap?" or "Why make it through all these big words just to hear be more confused?"

Can you blame them? It is like reading a Nabokov story reduced to computer code. Yes, that would be useful for moving it onto a digital media or storing it; but that's not how it works for the human brain. "Spring In Fialta," for instance, needs to be experienced. And this is the same for philosophy. It must be understood in its art form prior to being understood in history as dates and periods, or memorized for a test, "Socrates asked a lot of questions over and over …" they write and that is the end.

To ask a teacher to remove the magic of creativity and to reduce the scale on which one displays great ideas in parallel to their forms - the great production of philosophy in action, in life - and to systematize, is something that can only result in what we see today: the anti-philosophy position. "All you do is talk in circles and use big words, who cares?"

Philosophy is no more data than an individual human is merely cells. Yes, some empirical philosophers believe this and maybe that is how we got here (see Hume, "bundle of sensations.") When we really think about our selves - and I mean our 'selves" - we might not be able to explain our enduring identity (what the simple people call a soul) but we see it there. This is a crux of the commonsense position (and about what Kant struggled for a lifetime to ground for the Empiricists), and that is this: Empiricists centuries ago could not explain the self and so they looked deeply and with great effort to deny it and explain why it "seems" like we have a self when we do not. Hume actually meant, though in his private life he seemed to regret it, that habituation, the repeated activities of life, mimic a continuing self; it tricks us into believing we endure and that we are consistently "us" day to day. Imagine that! It never occurred to them, as it did to Reid, that if we don't know, it can stay that way and still be a fundamental truth, like gravity. They spent their time - considerable time - denying it. Yes, Kant and Mill wanted to suggest that Hume did believe outwardly that reality and the self and cause could exist, he merely wanted us to see that it wasn't 100 percent. But when one reads Hume's life work there is a commonsensical reaction that can only be the opposite.

Imagine an influential thinker in a pivotal time in our history realizing that though time exists, he cannot explain it. In response, he spends his life efforts denying it. That is what I'm talking about. Now, to be fair, if I could waste my life reading less "social" thinkers like Kant, and Heidegger and the rest, I'm sure there is something about "time" in there (it is in the title of much of their HC writing) but what I do know is that, as Reid says, you can write and write, argue and argue, but when you're done you're back to the beginning because true "givens" cannot be explained any better with big words as they can by "I don't know." I paraphrased Reid here btw. And, it must be added, he got it from Newton.

To understand the business of philosophy (or for that matter an individual person) one must talk and engage. Philosophy is alive in a way that economics is not. Most of sciences describes inert matter (medicine, for example, targets what is inert in us) and when it describes psychology (mind) it seems to parallel philosophy and, for the most part, fail to achieve what philosophy can. Philosophy is pre-science in a way that humans are pre-AI. It invented science and contains such a depth and organic broad-ness that, like all inventors, its offshoot science is merely a tiny piece, the piece that concretized and broke away into certainty.

To understand philosophy one must engage, talk, and become … and once provoked, philosophy becomes the talker, the teacher and the inspiration. It becomes an unsystematic teacher that uses creative language, not big words; that uses art and the best of science (science put in its proper place, like Reid), not rote knowledge; that uses process activity, the idea that philosophy is alive in the town square, and not dry lectures.

Ultimately a philosophy teachers job is to shed light on that boundary, that line where rote ends and reaches its maximum usefulness, and process begins. Most people never see the boundary, never know it exists, because most teachers have gained power through rote, and their methods are rote, and like the potentially apathetic students, have a growing suspicion, a pessimism, a regret and even rancor to and of the art of philosophy.