DOING PHILOSOPHY--Philosophy's Ill Repute

DOING PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy’s Ill Repute

Exploring transcendental method-the-theory, verifying the theory, and going through the process of self-appropriation-affirmation are unapologetically philosophical. I say unapologetically because, in the present common air of thought, philosophy has somewhat of a bad reputation. Of course, not everyone thinks alike; however, for many reasons, some claim that philosophy (and a study of foundations) is no longer relevant; and some claim that philosophers live in ivory towers, are unconnected with the “real world,” and have their heads in the clouds.

However, and to relate philosophy to your own personal and daily activities, philosophy was-is-will-be born of your own thoughtful reflection and self-reflection; and though you may not have identified philosophy’s clear trail of footsteps in yourself or others around you, philosophy is already a potential if not a reality in your own thought. That is, philosophy springs from your own spontaneous and abiding love of knowledge--of your knowing what is and is not so in real and concrete circumstances--and that love has already brought you to any knowledge or even wisdom you already have and can rightly lay claim to. By way of contrast, I presume you have experienced your own ignorance from time to time, and that you do not love it.

At its core, then, and regardless of its many uneven jaunts into theory over the centuries, philosophy has always been an affair of the heart as we strive for human authenticity—to know more about and to become better at who and what we are and can be. Though philosophy has its theoretical side, it is also intensely personal, intimate, and comprehensively relevant to all human living in history—including to all kinds of theoretical jaunts. If so, and if philosophy has an ill-repute, then it has been wrongly understood, or perhaps judged only on its sometimes-massive mistakes and failures, or in terms of those who have used philosophy as fog, or to steer us in the wrong direction, even if that steering was with the fullest of good intentions.

In this way, only if your own mind, heart, and reflective powers live in an ivory tower does philosophy live in one; and only if you are incredibly thoughtless, and if you abandon your own potential towards reflection and self-reflection, and dynamic unity of mind, can philosophy be thought of as irrelevant to you.

I should add that, over 2000 years ago Plato, who was no slouch when it comes to reflection and self-reflection, knew philosophy as an essential development in any complex and growing culture, especially when faced with finding a new relationship with peoples and cultures other than one’s own. In fact, philosophy as a distinct avenue of thought grew out of the many new questions that spontaneously emerged from mixing many cultures and their different ways together, and from the confusion of thought that commonly surrounds such mixing.

Philosophy emerged as a way of sorting everything out. Those like Plato, who defined and took up philosophy as a way of life, were searching for a view of the whole, for some over-riding truths, for some unity and continuity underpinning the confusion, and for a way to organize human life on both a writ-small (you and me and each person) and writ-large (you, me, and everyone else as a group or as in groups) level that could reflect that sense of unity, continuity, and good.

In this way, philosophy is essential to persons and to culture in history--if we are to avoid becoming like herds of Lemmings running off cliffs, or if we are to avoid getting on a horse and running off in several different directions at once, or if we are to avoid blowing ourselves up. In such a complex world as ours, it will take a great deal of good reflection by many folks to keep from doing that.

Further, our present work is at least about bringing transcendental method to secular and religious education through teachers who have gained a fundamental, and fundamentally clear, understanding of TM and how it works within all of us and in history. In this regard, Plato also regarded philosophy as never being far from our inquiry about the divine (Pieper, 1963; & Piscitelli, 2006). Thus, and again, at several junctures in the present work, we will explore the religious elements of philosophical thought; not as doctrine or dogma, but as the fundamental quest of mystery and for ultimate meaning that is evident in all cultures in history (Hughes, 2003).

So to give philosophy’s critics their due, and in our regard for philosophy’s residential status and prima fascia contributions, let us keep the baby that is our self-reflection, and throw out the bathwater that is philosophy’s many flights, faults, false starts, and their effects. That is, let us recall the current, sometimes deserved, ill-repute of philosophy as the short-view fad that it is, or as undeservedly demonized, and as perhaps rooted in the fear that philosophy inspires in many--of raising new questions against old received ideas. Further, let us place our understanding of philosophy in the greater context of how it manifests as reflective thought in all human history, how it threatens dogma and hidden agendas and, further, how we find philosophy’s origin in the intimacy of our spontaneous desire for knowledge and truth, and in our development of our own self-reflective potential.

Such recall, and the development of your philosophical capacities of self-reflection, will serve you well in your movement towards the critical self-knowledge that the present work is about and that is called self-appropriation and self-affirmation.