What Does it Mean to Philosophize?

That's the title of an outstanding essay in Pieper's For the Love of Wisdom. Let's pick it apart, shall we?

First of all, -- and this me speaking -- the conduct of any discipline, from physics at the bottom to theology at the top, is determined by its proper object. You don't use meditation or introspection to study rocks or chemicals, just as you don't use calipers to measure the soul. Different objects, different approaches.

Agreed. So, what is the object of philosophy? Correct: everything. However, not the sum of every single thing, rather, the singular unity of everything. Thus, philosophy (the verb) is guided by the implicit assumption, or axiom, or -- I would say -- recognition that we inhabit a cosmos, i.e., a single order ordered by a single principle. If this sounds obvious, it's because your mind has been Judeo-Christianized, ZAP. You're free!

Let's talk about this One Big Object we're chasing. First, it can't literally be a mere object, because this would exclude the larger world of subjectivity, personhood, and verticality more generally. If reality is a material object, then whoops!, there goes philosophy. I won't press the point, because we have too much goround to encircle. Either you get it or you don't.

Can we stipulate that only man can philosophize? This being the case, it points to a wall of separation between chimp and spirit. But if philosophy (the verb) is something only man can do, our philosophy (noun) surely must provide a sufficient reason for this exceedingly strange fact. To argue, for example, that it's but a case of "selfish genes" is just weaseling past the academic knaveyard.

Let's put it this way: reduction is fine as a method, but terrible as a metaphysic, i.e., when it is unironicaly expanded into a fool-blown Ism and all-encompassing vision of the whole. One is free to do this, but only if you put on 2-D glasses and go from 20/∞ to 20/Ø vision.

Suffice it to say that ideological blindness isn't just another form of vision, any more than a feminist is just another type of female; rather, the negation thereof. I challenge you to find any philo, much less sophia, in either.

I would put it this way: philosophy is the quintessential act of vertical transcendence; it is always at a right angle to (mere) existence, and opens out to the Absolute and (therefore) Infinitude.

This is obvious enough conceptually, i.e., in the abstract, but it is also concretely accessible experientially, at least if you're on the creative side. In fact, you needn't even be particularly creative, rather, just have a developed appreciation for the creativity of others. I can't play jazz, but am awed by the vibratory worlds to which it gives access. Taste goes a long way.

Yesterday we spoke of fake nous, which is more than a bad pun. Rather, as we know, we are surrounded by bad, inadequate, and even diabolical philosophies that can only be caricatures of the real thing:

it is common to all these sham-realizations that they not only fail to transcend the world but that they bring it ever more firmly and irrevocably under one dome; that they serve to confine man ever more within the world of work.

This is what the left means by all the robotic blather about "unity," which is just a synonym for totalitarian coercion. It's not the freedom to be different, rather, a ban on difference: no individuals allowed!

Such slackless and spurious forms of pseudo-philosophy result in "man's sealing himself off from the extraordinary." This is among the first things we want to say to leftist anthropoids swaddled in their own ideological diapers: that's not a proper philosophy worthy of man -- it's a prison!

I'm remurmuring those worthy words about how the Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.

But not necessarily, and certainly not inevitably. We can always draw the cave blinds open and let the Light stream in.

Yes, we have to grow up, but this hardly means we have to be pneumacognitively frozen in high school, or worse, college. There are always doors and windows, and best of all, a spiral staircase. Try it. It's there for a reason: because it leads somewhere. (Why would stairs lead nowhere? That's a nonstarter, a lead balloon if ever there was one.)

Now I'm remembering something Chesterton says about modern philosophies: they are doors with no home attached. You might say they are circumferences with no center, or radii with no point. Yes, utterly pointless. But enough about the DNC convention. Let's stop rambling and answer the flippin' question. Pieper is leading us to reason and calling us to join him.

I don't want to soil the page or plant words in his mouth, but Pieper essentially agrees that 1) there are two paths you can go by, and 2) there's still time to change the road you're on:

whither is the philosophizing person transported when transcending the [horizontal] world of work? Obviously he crosses a boundary: What kind of realm is this that lies beyond the boundary? And how is the realm into which the philosophical act penetrates related to the world that is surpassed and transcended through just this philosophical act?

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind? This may be close enough for rock & roll, but we'll try to be a bit less airy-fairy and more specific tomorrow.