De-Gennois

The ship has already left port but a belated realization arises to double check the manifest and ensure all passengers have boarded safely.

A recent reading of the original Genesis brought back some painful memories. It was the first time I read that chapter since I was small, the first time I read it because I simply wanted to read it, but, strangely, it still had the same effect on me. Just a few pages into a long and pointless genealogy, filled with wandering symbology and unbelievable representations of our origins, and I just wanted to immediately turn to the last page of the last chapter to see if any of this was even worth my time.

Sound familiar to you?

But we know that jumping straight to Revelations is probably not a good idea, right? There’s a bit of the story in between that may arguably be too important to miss. Why does the Bible do that to me? I don’t know but I can’t dwell on the Bible for long.

The point today is to get this burden off my head and to tip our collective chapeau’s in the direction of Misters Derrida and Clinton. Therefore, as we begin a discussion of what is is, we must define what is is not.

Now, why begin there? Is that jumping ahead? I don’t think so because it comes to my attention that philosophy is never much more than a quest for the definition of it’s own purpose. Pick any scholar and read what is written about the meaning of philosophy. I think you’ll find that few agree.

And, like the Bible, I don’t like to linger too long on etymology’s doorsteps since the residents of that community seem to move around a bit too often as well. But I personally accept the Greek inference when it comes to the word itself. If you are my “philo” then you are my friend who I love. And if you are knowledge, then I name you beautiful “Sophia”. And with that, I am naïvely happy to begin asking questions.

To begin, we could hop around philosophical inquiry with “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is existence?“ or any of a number of other interesting questions. In fact, scholars today like to break philosophy into little bits, placing the bits in appropriately named pigeon holes here and there in order to deal with it all somewhat more scientifically. And unlike many other academic concerns, it’s important to note that the history of philosophy itself is an entirely separate order.

I believe a telling indication of what is to come, perhaps, is that only humans think like this. Only humans give birth to these questions. Maybe alien life forms will teach us differently some day. But philosophy, for now, is the natural child of human curiosity. We don’t have much more to work with regarding the origin. More on this later, of course.

But from the very bowels of this Frankenstein-like child roars a monstrous question which gathers all the vigilant townsfolk into an angry lynch mob, jumping as they are wont to do to the last page of the last chapter. What, then, they scream, is the most important question in philosophy? What are we really trying to have knowledge of? What do we want to know?

In the modern world, there are those who summarize the answers to those questions with “everything” and those who answer with “anything”, clearly two distinct possibilities. A third possibility is “consensus” and perhaps you can come up with a fourth or fifth. I admit, I am also prone to simplifying these questions when I am able to do so.

Quite often, however, it is at this point that my friends respond with a colorful description of their anguish when even considering the answers to such questions. A typical cop-out is to define it all as “too deep” for further discussion. Others will confess they are simply not capable of reaching any conclusion. Others may describe certain ailments, headaches and the like, when pondering the imponderable. Well, those are all good and comforting replies, in my opinion. As the modern athletes say: no pain, no gain.

Now, a pause to refresh and consider what questions I painfully ask myself.

Cheers,
MEB