De Consolatio Philosophiae


 


About a year ago, prompted by reading the infuriating yet oddly compelling book The Closing of the American Mind, I took it into my head that I should do a blog on philosophy, perhaps a cooperative blog. I blathered about it to my friends, even came up with a title (The New New Organon)--but events interfered as they tend to, and I let it slide. I made the observation then that although amateur philosophy seems to be a contradiction these days, it's really a redundancy, if you look at the etymologies of the words.

The following is pretty personal, and pretty dark in places, so be warned. (Of course nobody would be dissuaded by such a warning: it's more of an apology.) But it's a way of explaining why I believe philosophy is important.

I was a smart kid. A very smart kid. For example, I can't remember not knowing how to read. My earliest memory is of falling asleep in my crib surrounded by books. One girl decided she wanted to go out with me in high school because she worked in the guidance office and saw my IQ scores. (which is another story--a long, strange one.)
But there was a terrible side to this as well. I absorbed a lot of science very early, and with it, the dominant scientific world view: the universe is a big machine, and I was a bag of water that ended at the skin and ended at death. And I still remember standing in our living room at the age of maybe 4 or 5 knowing that I was going to die. My mother was working in another room, and I was horribly afraid, wanting to run to her and have her comfort me--but knowing at the same time that nothing she could say could make any difference.
I knew at that same early age that this was not proven--that the religious instruction I had received might just as well be true. But the mere possibility of annihilation terrified me--and the magnificent achievements of science, and the authority with which all this was proclaimed only made the black specter more powerful.
And it was made worse by my precocity: I once worried my Sunday School teachers for about two hours after services on Sunday, blubbering red-faced about the laws of thermodynamics and the heat-death of the universe. They were wonderful kind women, but they had no idea what I was talking about.
I spent a lot of my energy throughout my youth trying to find a way out: I read tons of advanced mathematics, trying to see if topology or group theory would yield a hint or a fraction of truth (and as a result never mastered the subject matter very well); I also read folks from St. Anselm to Oliver Lodge --and tons of science fiction of the more philosophical sort, like Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon, Philip K. Dick, and A.E. van Vogt, in the hope that some of their assertions might be found to be supportable. Gradually I discovered that there was no luck either way: mathematics was 'true', but only because it was based on tautology; and visions of God, the soul and the afterlife could compellingly done with great intellectual depth, but none, none of it could be proved.
And most of the rest of the time I spent trying not to think about it all. (I didn't succeed too well: I would still burst out screaming at all sorts of times, and only a sense of shame kept me from doing it in company.)
I don't know how many other human beings had this sort of a childhood: it made the approval of my mother and father, and of my peers, rather flat and unimportant. On the plus side, it made me wonderfully happy just to be alive, and ferociously intellectually curious. But it also made me scared of change--and possessed of a deep-seated conviction that people couldn't help me.

(I told you it would be dark. Next time listen to me.)

Once I went to the University of Chicago, I started getting exposed to philosophy. And the deep end of the pool: Heidegger and Nietzsche as well as Plato and Aristotle. (The U of C does not do survey courses, either: it was reading and wrestling with the real stuff.) And slowly, slowly, I began to get some perspective on the nightmare.
One of the things Heidegger asserted was a big revelation: It's (and I paraphrase very loosely) that all philosophical inquiry really only runs around in a circle, ending up where you began. But the remarkable thing is that the process of running around in a circle, done right, actually yields useful stuff. And I also learned that philosophical inquiry is almost all negative: philosophy triumphs when it shows that you really can't say that any more. Both very weird statements, but as I began to understand the truth of them, I began, over many years, to find--something.

I had learned earlier the bind I was in : any evidence of God or life after death that came from an outside source was filtered through the five senses and couldn't be trusted: while any evidence that came from within could very easily be me fooling myself. Discovering that I had come to the same point that Immanuel Kant had didn't do much for me at first, but moving from personal torment to the larger tradition of inquiry (and keeping Heidegger in mind) gradually moved me from it's not fair! to what can we say about this?
One day I said to myself, in a fit of philosophy, the fact that there is no proof of this says more about 'proof' than it does about anything else, doesn't it?

In the end, it led back to the source: Socrates, who said (again loosely) that the admission of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. The standard survey-course gloss on this is that it brings humility, but that misses a tremendously important point: what it really leads to is openness.

Philosophy did not bring me an answer to my dreadful dilemma: as I've known ever since sometime about the age of 4, only my own death will do that. And I'm still scared of what may be. But I titled this post after Boethius (another book I desperately devoured) for a reason. The picture philosophy paints of What Is The Case is that if we walk in any direction, follow any path mental, spiritual, scientific, moral, or social, we end up in the void, with no firm ground to stand on, nothing distinct or identifiable, where our words get fuzzy, our ideas ambiguous, nothing to hold, nothing to know, nowhere to stand, no one to be. It's a terrible place, and most people--and nearly all people for most of their lives--shun it with fear and trembling. Faced with it, most of humanity takes one or two positions: the first, not to think about it at all, and the second, to choose to believe something, and find comfort and certainty in that. (And that something can be Science as well as Spirit. Many adherents of Science view religion/mysticism/spirituality as narrow and closed, and in many ways they're right. Science has walked into lands that priests and mystics never dreamt of. But they get irritated when they point out that they're circumscribed as well. Ask a question as simple as 'what is the difference between positive and negative charge?' and there's no answer forthcoming from science--or most questions with the word 'is' in them. Ask other questions, like 'Why does anything exist?', 'Why does Law persist?', or 'Why does Chance work the way it does?' and the adherents of Science find themselves in the void. Science is very carefully circumscribed, and its amazing achievements are testimony to the effectiveness of that circumscription. )

For those of us who ultimately can't take either one of those roads (at least, not all the time), philosophy is a third way, a way that gives you odd new questions instead of answers, a way that, rather than build you a new set of pictures, erases the ones you already have. It's a way that, the first time one tries it, feels an awful lot like falling and tumbling endlessly, or, alternately, running around in a circle. Either terrifying and comfortless, or stupid and unrewarding, or both.

Ultimately, though, this is what I've found the Consolation of Philosophy to be: that I could spend my time and my energy and my mind demanding things the cosmos is not going to give me--or I could open my eyes and mind to what it will. I did learn (with the Buddha) that my fear was not so much that I feared death as that I loved my life, my awareness--and that, when you come right down to it, I didn't know what awareness was any more than I knew what Death is. Mind you, that's no substitute for an answer, and I will still shout out in the middle of the night in fear, now and then.

But there's this feeling when I look around me and ask--really ask--What Is The Case Here. And I don't know, but it feels like wisdom.

And I love it.

Posted: Monday - March 14, 2005 at 12:06 PM        

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