The philosophical opinions of a youth can only be interesting to his mother. --Dávila
I did once take a philosophy class. It must have been to fulfill an undergraduate humanities requirement or something. In any event, it was a course in logic which I ended up enjoying, even if I didn't make the leap to applying it to my actual life, let alone thought, since that hadn't yet made an appearance. It was beer, rock music, and goofing off, all the way down.
Not too long after that I did begin dabbling in philosophy per se, but never in any systematic way. Rather, the opposite: mostly randomly, but if anything, in a fully assbackward way, beginning in the present and moving backward.
In order to pretend that we know a subject, it is advisable to adopt its most recent interpretation.
Just as I assumed there was no meaningful music prior to Elvis, I assumed philosophy must, like science, be progressive. No scientist has to start with old and debunked ideas in order to study the current ones, so why shouldn't I begin by diving into the latest philosophical fad?
Back then there was no amazon, and in my neck of the woods just a B. Dalton Books with a few shelves of philosophy. Hmm. Being and Nothingnesss by Sartre, whose name I must have heard in a Woody Allen movie. 900 pages. That oughtta cover it!
The fool, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated.
With no context whatsoever, I dove right in, and soon enough believed myself to be a full-blown atheistic existentialist. I don't think I ever actually got through the book, as I found his prose to be indigestible.
Speaking of which, I did read his novel Nausea, and that was sufficient to give me the bottom line: that there is no God and that life is meaningless; or rather, it is nothingness except insofar as we are forced to make choices that determine its meaning. We first exist, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except define ourselves, since there are no essences or objective standards of any kind.
Philosophers often start from their conclusions in order to invent their principles.
For Sartre, we are condemned to a freedom which itself is a kind of nothingness, since it has no telos: existence is anterior to essence, meaning that we do not discover or perfect ourselves, rather, create ourselves via our choices.
Somewhere Sartre says that existentialism is nothing but the attempt to draw all the consequences of a strict and consistent atheism. As such, precisely because there is no God, there can be no human nature. Wo, that is deep!
Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep.
Only much later did I come to realize that Sartre had unwittingly proven the existence of God. For he takes the non-existence of God as simply axiomatic, while at the same time promulgating the complete contingency of the world and everything in it.
Have you ever felt this way? I did for a few months in the 1980s, when my existentialism reached an acute phase and nothing meant anything, and vice versa. Then again, it may have just been a clinical depression.
Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.In truth, an "absolute contingency" is not just absurd but impossible and unthinkable. Rather, contingency implies a necessity on which it must be parasitic, or at the very least, complementary to. In such a world there would be no basis or foundation for either theism or atheism.
"Wait a minute," I recall saying to myself. "It isn't possible to live out the consequences of a strict atheism, unless one is literally psychotic" (by this time I had begun studying psychology, also in a random way, but enough to distinguish relative normality from complete craziness).
Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.
Anyway, from dabbling in Sartre's nihilism I read randomly from Bertrand Russell to Wittgenstein to Nietzsche to Foucault, jumping around to Bergson and Whitehead, tossing in a few rationalists, then jumping all the way back to Plato. Stopping at Aquinas would have been a complete non-starter. Never would it have occurred to me that
Ideas less than a thousand years old are not fully reliable.
Or that
He who does not place his life alongside the great texts places it alongside the clichés of his time.
Why am I burdening the reader with these soph-indulgent reflections? To illustrate what happens when you dive into the sea of philosophy without a canoe or oars, let alone map or captain. How did I not simply sink beneath the waters of tenure and drown in my own BS?
In hindsight, I guess a turning point was bumping into Ken Wilber's The Spectrum of Consciousness. The book means nothing to me now, but at the time it provided the impetus for an ontological u-turn, in which I was able to reorient myself to a bright-side up cosmos, and take it from there. Now, instead of drawing the consequences of utter contingency, it became necessary to draw the consequences of Necessary Being.
My main point is that there is an Order in things, and it is for us to discover and elaborate it, not invent it. How much wasted time could I have avoided if I had only been introduced to this order when I was a young adult in college, or maybe even high school, instead of having to rediscover the wheel?
The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.
Oh well. In a certain sense I suppose it's providential, as my foundation in stupidity is quite secure. Having lived it, I know all about it, such that no one could talk me out of it (or back into it). This existential stupidity is indeed a ground of my certitude, and there are a number of aphorisms that prove I'm not alone:
It is not to increasing our knowledge to which we may aspire, but to documenting our ignorance.
Intelligence by itself possesses nothing but rebellious slaves.
Genuine atheism is to man’s reason what the ten-thousand-sided polygon is to his imagination.
Hell is any place from which God is absent.
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