Pursuing praxis

A passing thought from elsewhere…

It occured to me that philosophy, being the widest of the sciences and the broadest form of knowledge, encompasses all of life, all of living, every single aspect of it. Much as a life contains all the experiences of the person whose life it is. And, as important and productive and instructive as I think our conversations here are, and the books that we read that in part fuel them, I think that medium - this medium - is a sort of isolation and concentration of a part of a wider whole. Obviously. And with purpose.

However, the best way to get at philosophy, sensu lato and en toto (and in vivo - my little Latin is running away with me), is through something that approximates life. We could just say ‘life’ or ‘living’ but then it would be the same thing as that - reducible - and so pointless to give two names. And something that is not the same as life, but encompasses all that life does, and yet manages to concentrate and highlight the elements directly pertaining to philosophic concerns, to stylize and emphasize them and bring our attention and consideration to them - is art.

A way of living a life that isn’t yours and isn’t real or tangible, but deals with all of it, and demonstrates to the mind the things to be instructed (for I think the best instruction is demonstration, not pontification). A painting or sculpture that sucks you into a moment, a feeling, an experience, a *value*, as a mirror held in front of you. A book that follows the lives and relations of people, their thoughts and choices and feelings, and how they intersect against the backdrop of reality. It’s like living several lives, all at once, in the span of a few hundred pages and a couple days. How powerful is that? How instructive is that?

It’s incredible.

And it’s useful, for - in my book - the point of philosophy broadly is as an aid to living. If it takes your entire life’s resources to learn what you need to know to live, you have expended your life in trying to attain it. In principle, that is, in the best of all possible circumstances. I am by no means against professional philosophy, or philosophic professionals (in fact I think the truly honest person cannot help but be one, even if Philosophy is foreign to him as an enterprise). But ideally philosophy should not per force consume those who seek it in order to do something else.

Ah, ideally…

Yes, ideally. And really, and realistically. I think they are all one in the same, when properly situated and related. Just as I can touch neither consciousness nor time, but experience both, and I can disrupt those tangible things that physically (dynamically, by a process) enable the conception of both.