Just thinking about philosophy

Here’s an image of a book that I checked out from my local library. It has nothing to do with the entry that follows, but I needed a picture to put at the beginning of this post, so I photographed the volume, since it happened to be by my side, along with the bookmark (which I was using to keep my place) over the top of it.

But then I noticed that the bookmark was covering certain crucial info & sorely obscuring the cover of the book; thus leaving potential readers with no way to accurately judge it. (As it is written: Judge a book by its cover.)

And then I realized that letters of the author’s name that remained uncovered by the bookmark could be manipulated to spell my OWN name! Therefore I used my computer-art program to manipulate them so that they spelled "BRYAN RAY", so now it looks like I, even I, wrote this cool book.

& also its title, down near the bottom in golden handwriting, was in need of filling in, so I filled that in too.

[HINT: it was originally Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.]

Dear diary,

Reminder: write a blog entry here. (That’s a note-to-self.) – In the meantime, what are you thinking about?

Well, I’m thinking of glass, cuz we gotta get our broken window replaced (see my recent entries “A smash hit” and “No more smash hits”) . . . And now I’m thinking about philosophy — I mean the word, the concept — because yesterday I heard from an old friend who said “I like philosophizing; you & I should philosophize more.”

That’s a good topic to blog about: philosophy. Let’s start there.

I’m sure that millions of minds much better than mine have broken down the etymology, but I like to proceed with caution; so let me repeat what you probably already know:

Philo = love (of)
Sophia = wisdom

—those are Greek words. So it seems that philosophy would mean “the love of wisdom”.

Alright, so what then would it mean to philosophize? One would then be participating in some sort of act that has something to do with the loving of wisdom.

Here’s where I get tripped up: Aren’t pretty much ALL actions that human beings partake in a type of philosophizing? — I mean, everything that I myself do in my daily life is performed in homage to wisdom, as if I’m a troubadour and every poem I write proclaims my courtly love for Sophia. (By “poem” and “write” I mean “deed” and “do”.) But Sophia is married to another magistrate; so I just continue to admire her from afar, never expecting to get any closer.

Now, here’s a question for myself: Do you prefer practical philosophy or abstract philosophy?

Hmm, I wish I could answer me, but I honestly love both types with equal passion. Can a man serve two masters? Or mistresses, rather? (Matthew 6:24)

I love to decide what the best way is to meet everyone’s basic needs. I love to invent traffic lights, so that people can get to the grocery store safely and efficiently. I love to build bridges, whether physical ones that get folks from hell into heaven; or also spiritual bridges, like the bond between fathers and sons.

But I also enjoy daydreaming aimlessly, which is a brand of so-called abstract philosophy: leaning and loafing at my ease, observing a spark plug from an old automobile and wonderdering: What might this thing have in common with the LORD? Because nothing exists outside of God, & everything is a copy of God in some way; therefore even an old used spark plug is a reflection of the Creator of the Universe: the God of this World. (II Corinthians 4:4)

Right away, tho, I become wary; for I remember that people hate when you’re too much of a smartypants. People prefer their friends and companions to be slightly less intelligent than they themselves are. – That’s why folks love their pets so much. A pet will never philosophize better than its master. Many pets feign to be interested in nothing beyond smelling their environment: “Oh, look! a tree to smell. Oh, it smells like bark.”

Everything smells like bark, if that’s the only word you know — that’s what master presumes.

Lo: when master asks “What are you smelling there, little philosopher?” and you reply “Bark!” this is deeply pleasing to master, for he assumes that you are inferior because you’re a dog: HOWEVER the truth is that your language is so advanced that you no longer need to bother articulating all those phonemes so complexly; thus your snout has evolved into something much more fitting for a streamlined vocabulary, and all your words, which sound the same to human ears, actually paint wondrous concepts to any creature who (1) possesses a capable imagination; (2) has studied long enough to learn to listen; and (3) can decipher the intricacies, subtleties, and nuances of the expressions of the canine dialect — for the identical utterance can mean thrillions of different things, depending on what type of emotion the speaker invests in howling it or growling it.

And then there’s this other nagging question: What about religion and politics? Are these two items sub-categories of philosophy, or are they wholly unique realms of cogitation?

I think the best answer I can give is that I really don’t know. But my guess is that whichever of these disciplines an individual is most attracted to will be the one that that person will see as the prime domain that encompasses all the others, and the lesser topics will be filed within it, like cubby-holes in a great shelf:

Which reminds me of how the King James Bible looked before they printed it as a codex. Back in the days of Ezra the Scribe, they had a big wooden shelving unit with all these narrow compartments in it, where the priests would keep the rolled up scrolls that contained the Hebrew Scriptures. But this piece of furniture would take up most of whatever room you kept it in (the ancients kept it in the temple — at least that’s how I imagine it), so it was an yuge improvement when the printing press was invented, cuz then all those scrolls were compressed into extremely thin pages in a hardbound book. And tho this book was thick, it still was much smaller than the network of cubby shelves that they had been using just three days ago and which was literally a library; so, once the wooden unit was broken down for kindling, the priests were thankful to have more space to store their other belongings, such as tennis shoes & tennis racquets.

So my point is that if you like religion best, you’ll probably testify that philosophy and politics are subsections of your faith. Whereas if you like politics best, you’ll rank both religion and philosophy as diminutive latecomers to the party that has been taking place in your polis. And I myself am a fan of rap music from the late 1980s, therefore I contend that every iniquity in this trinity — politics, wisdom-love, AND religion — are all just different styles of rapping.

So now I’ll end this with my philosophy on sing-rapping:

Stop sing-rapping. Either sing OR rap but don’t do both. To combine singing with rapping is immoral. It is an abomination unto the LORD. I hate these youngsters who walk down our street holding a tiny little white i-Box (or whatever teeny personal radios are called nowadays — ideally they should be big black boomboxes blasting, but everything sux now) sing-rapping along with a flimsy pop-beat.

Fools, let me tell you: Rap should make you afraid. It is NOT a thing that you wanna hear advancing toward you on the curbside. It is a stroke of doom, like when the sun gets extinguished. It should be like a raid siren or some sort of “End of Civilization” warning. – The drums can be funky: I’m fine with that; but no harmony or soft crooning, please: it’s the opposite of chocolate-plus-peanut-butter. You twerps who come sing-rapping past my house make me puke. That’s my philosophy. There, I proved it.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: it would be good, when producing a recording of the above speech for an online college course, if the editor would punctuate that last line with the sound-effect of a gunshot. I think that this would be the most effective way to make the students awaken & decide to read the piece over again.]