What is Philosophy and Philosophizing?
Philosophizing concerns itself with the actual TERRITORY of potentially intelligible experience – in its ENTIRETY – and with the rational mapping of that territory: pioneering and cartography. The modern philosopher attaches equal value and importance to both the outer and inner realms of experience – both of which are regarded as OBJECTIVE in nature. (“Subjectivity” applies to the personal idiosyncrasies of the thinker and constitutes something of a necessary evil that the philosopher is always striving to objectify and see BEYOND.)
Like Columbus, the philosopher avails himself of the maps rendered by other cartographers who came before, but – also like Columbus – he relies chiefly upon his mysterious but indisputably real inner certainty that there is more to be discovered than can be found on any available maps. Also, like Columbus, the philosopher who first lands on previously un-mapped shores is apt to mis-name or mis-treat that TERRA INCOGNITA precisely because its true character and peculiarities are, as yet, unknown. That work is best carried out by the settlers who come later, since they have the benefit of hindsight and a more stable acquaintance with the “New World.” Thus, we see that the pioneering spirit is better equipped, by nature and temperament, to open up new territory for exploration than the settler type, who is better suited to make full and proper use of that newly claimed territory.
A thinker who is bloated with half-formed thoughts and gaseous intuitions is like a woman who is always pregnant but unable, for some reason, to actually DELIVER the unfinished embryo or fetus lodged within her womb. A fitful, skittish thinker who never allows his seed-like thoughts and insights to ripen and attain their proper degree of animate complexity is like a woman who suffers from one miscarriage after another – never able to make it through the full gestation period. The seasoned and discerning creative thinker is like a woman who gives regularly repeated, healthy birth, sometimes even to triplets and quadruplets, and soon has a burgeoning family under her watchful and conscientious eyes and hands.
As early as she can, the philosopher acquaints herself with the full array of colored ships within the kaleidoscope – those generally stable and timeless elements that are ultimately responsible for the infinite variety of particular, individualized configurations generated by the ever-turning kaleidoscope. Without a respectful acquaintance with as many of these “archetypal” elements as she can discern, she will have little recourse but to reduce all the complex configurations to the one or two elements that she does know about. Such elements have names like ‘will to power,’ sexuality (ἔρως), chance (τύχη), play (līlā), entropy, neutrality/equilibrium, etc. The greater the philosopher, the less likely she will be to fall prey to reductiveness. The greater the number of genuine elements acknowledged, the richer and more true to life will be the philosophical depiction of the whole.
We can see an analogy between philosophical activity and monitoring the changing weather in a meteorological scheme or system. The actual changes that are continually underway “in the air and on the ground” correspond to the totality of human activities as they unfold in the field of time, or history. The constants are abstract categories (air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, jet stream activity, oceanic currents and temperature, etc.) and these correspond to archetypes or the colored chips in the kaleidoscope. The interplay between these factors provides the stable framework or structural constraints within which the DYNAMICS of actual weather systems are made manifest.
The philosopher is concerned, among other things, with tracing the links between the actual phenomenological configurations – the intelligible events and symptoms generated by human experience – and the archetypal elements, or constants that always lie at the root of things (just as the colored chips are at the source of the infinitely variable kaleidoscopic images). In attending to these elusive or hidden links, the philosopher is able to intellectually ground the particulars in the archetypal sources out of which they emerge. The effects of such philosophical activity upon the soul of the thinker are of considerable spiritual import. Such disciplined philosophical activity has a divinely ANCHORING effect upon the mind – aligning the microcosmic philosopher with the macrocosmic scheme within which he lives as a spark or living image. Aside from the generally consoling effects of this mental experience of at-one-ment with a divinely ordered cosmos, there is a poignantly paradoxical sense of being both greatly EXPANDED in (the range and depth of) consciousness and profoundly HUMBLED by the recognition of one’s insignificant place in the sublime, stupendous scheme of things.
Paul
Philosophizing concerns itself with the actual TERRITORY of potentially intelligible experience – in its ENTIRETY – and with the rational mapping of that territory: pioneering and cartography. The modern philosopher attaches equal value and importance to both the outer and inner realms of experience – both of which are regarded as OBJECTIVE in nature. (“Subjectivity” applies to the personal idiosyncrasies of the thinker and constitutes something of a necessary evil that the philosopher is always striving to objectify and see BEYOND.)
Like Columbus, the philosopher avails himself of the maps rendered by other cartographers who came before, but – also like Columbus – he relies chiefly upon his mysterious but indisputably real inner certainty that there is more to be discovered than can be found on any available maps. Also, like Columbus, the philosopher who first lands on previously un-mapped shores is apt to mis-name or mis-treat that TERRA INCOGNITA precisely because its true character and peculiarities are, as yet, unknown. That work is best carried out by the settlers who come later, since they have the benefit of hindsight and a more stable acquaintance with the “New World.” Thus, we see that the pioneering spirit is better equipped, by nature and temperament, to open up new territory for exploration than the settler type, who is better suited to make full and proper use of that newly claimed territory.
A thinker who is bloated with half-formed thoughts and gaseous intuitions is like a woman who is always pregnant but unable, for some reason, to actually DELIVER the unfinished embryo or fetus lodged within her womb. A fitful, skittish thinker who never allows his seed-like thoughts and insights to ripen and attain their proper degree of animate complexity is like a woman who suffers from one miscarriage after another – never able to make it through the full gestation period. The seasoned and discerning creative thinker is like a woman who gives regularly repeated, healthy birth, sometimes even to triplets and quadruplets, and soon has a burgeoning family under her watchful and conscientious eyes and hands.
As early as she can, the philosopher acquaints herself with the full array of colored ships within the kaleidoscope – those generally stable and timeless elements that are ultimately responsible for the infinite variety of particular, individualized configurations generated by the ever-turning kaleidoscope. Without a respectful acquaintance with as many of these “archetypal” elements as she can discern, she will have little recourse but to reduce all the complex configurations to the one or two elements that she does know about. Such elements have names like ‘will to power,’ sexuality (ἔρως), chance (τύχη), play (līlā), entropy, neutrality/equilibrium, etc. The greater the philosopher, the less likely she will be to fall prey to reductiveness. The greater the number of genuine elements acknowledged, the richer and more true to life will be the philosophical depiction of the whole.
We can see an analogy between philosophical activity and monitoring the changing weather in a meteorological scheme or system. The actual changes that are continually underway “in the air and on the ground” correspond to the totality of human activities as they unfold in the field of time, or history. The constants are abstract categories (air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, jet stream activity, oceanic currents and temperature, etc.) and these correspond to archetypes or the colored chips in the kaleidoscope. The interplay between these factors provides the stable framework or structural constraints within which the DYNAMICS of actual weather systems are made manifest.
The philosopher is concerned, among other things, with tracing the links between the actual phenomenological configurations – the intelligible events and symptoms generated by human experience – and the archetypal elements, or constants that always lie at the root of things (just as the colored chips are at the source of the infinitely variable kaleidoscopic images). In attending to these elusive or hidden links, the philosopher is able to intellectually ground the particulars in the archetypal sources out of which they emerge. The effects of such philosophical activity upon the soul of the thinker are of considerable spiritual import. Such disciplined philosophical activity has a divinely ANCHORING effect upon the mind – aligning the microcosmic philosopher with the macrocosmic scheme within which he lives as a spark or living image. Aside from the generally consoling effects of this mental experience of at-one-ment with a divinely ordered cosmos, there is a poignantly paradoxical sense of being both greatly EXPANDED in (the range and depth of) consciousness and profoundly HUMBLED by the recognition of one’s insignificant place in the sublime, stupendous scheme of things.
Paul
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