I’m not sure it’s a blessing to have time to philosophize. That is, I can imagine a scenario where a handful of us our living in the woods, hundreds or thousands of years ago. The same people, Xanderman, Detrop, Dunamis and all the rest…but instead of talking about philosophy, they’re spending about 98% of the time talking about how to survive. How to catch the animal, slay the bear, build the fire. How to cure the sickness, survive the cold, catch the fish. We would have to talk of this out of necessity. NECESSITY! Think about that for a second. We don’t talk out of necessity anymore.
Is philosophy a little like a bored dog chewing off his own tail? You ever see that…in a domesticated dog that’s just bored out of his mind? I only say this because it would be fun to kill a bear with Detrop. Fun to celebrate afterwards.
Define necessity. I feel a lot of people still talk out of necessity. Maybe not because they have to do it for basic survival, but there is more to life then just that now. Mankind has in some sence become more then just basic survical. Now we adheard to something bigger then just ourself.
I do not mean bigger in any positive tone though, so don’t get me wrong.
actions taken for survival might be more invigorating. or maybe i’m talking simply about talking about things that will be applied, that will literally save you and rise you up in the world. maybe this does exist today, and maybe it exists in philosophy. i just wonder if philosophy is what’s left over when you’re separated or removed from your original place in nature.
Interesting… but do you think we’d have gotten to where we are today without philosophy, or even better… do you think we’ll continue to strive forward without philosophy?
We do it on here for fun… but philosophy just happens, it’s engrained in us to ask questions… to ponder.
I’m not going to explain my last philosophical thought to you. Think of it this way… when we come on here, we sort of force it in a way. You know? For fun. but every day, there are people out there engaging in philosophy. It may be sporradic, and it may be unoticed to the people themselves… but they’re doing it.
You’re asking whether the person needs to comprehend that what they’re doing is philosophy, for it to be philosophy. If we take a funcationalist approach, I might be able to squeeze through a loophole. For instance, if the function of philosophy is thinking, for the sake thinking, then unbenounced or not, they are operating the function of philosophy.
We’ve been doing it for six thousand years and we still don’t know what it is! If sex were as complicated real estate would be much cheaper, a alot more dinosaurs would still be available to be refined and the ozone layer would still be intact! But for sure, we would certainly know our a priories from our posteriories much better.
Maybe in another six thousand years we’ll get sick of the question. In the meantime ‘Just do it’ … whatever that is and not haste to any premature conclusions that philosophy may merely be filling in misc. sundry potholes because they’re there.
To put it in a very personal and basic way, for me philosophy is consuming knowledge and processing it.
I like to learn, and I like to think.
I may not be because I have a primal necessity to do it on a personal level. But I feel mankind needs “thinking” and knowledge to keep going in the path we are set in.
I’ve never figured out how to seperate philosophy from living. I question that we ever have, or ever will, stop looking for meaning. Even after killing the bear and after all the celebrating, in the quiet hours we look into the night sky and the questions arise.
Still I wonder if, in our advanced stage of ‘civilization’ we lose the connections between the words and the realitiies of living, and the words become life and not just about life…
I think instead of spending 99% of my time talking about metaphysics, I should be spending more time directly doing something that yields something more concrete in terms of my growth, survival, pleasure. It’s a sad day when you have nothing left to do but philosophise. I wanna get locked in an elevator so I can escape through the trap door. I want to make a fire from scratch. I want to jump off a balcony, land on a terrorist rendering him unconscious. I want to devise a way to hunt better so that the spear hits the pray every…wait a sec…they have meat at the super market. Oh well. Can’t fuck, eat, or have an adventure at the moment. Kant anyone? Blech.
What is weird about this idea is the underlying notion that we have more spare time that our nomad hunter-gatherer ancestors. We spend many more hours per day working just to survive in our contemporary lifestyle than they ever did. That ancient way of life could teach all the basics of how to survive by the time a child was around 13 years old. Survival then was not a monumentous task. So really there would have been more time to philosophize. More time to consider, to ruminate, to think. Thoughts could slow down and become really weighty. Time was not as compressed and segmented as it is now.
Well X that’s true in some cases I suppose, although you can imagine the intense ruminations about finding that next meal or building a warmer hut – things I never think about now, ever. I guess I wish I didn’t have time to think about metaphysics. I wish I had to think about just surviving. I wish my victories involved something as simple and elemental as a warm fire, and something I killed to roast over it. The victory of feeding a good woman and our children. The victory of dying a good death long before there were such things as heiroglyphic obituaries or burial tombs. The heyday of humanity, when our bodies fit with our surroundings. The way things are now I’m ready to become a cyborg any time - that’s my answer. Maybe philosophy is something we do when we have too little to do.
You say this now, but back then I feel it was all about angst. You did not have time to value your life, you just had to live and constantly work for it. One moments rest could cost you very much, and that would give any man a lot of angst.
I agree that often a “simpler” life is better, but saying that ancient people had it simpler is far fetched in my mind.
Well then. Yes you’re right. What was I thinking? They lived lives of loud desperation, short and brutish, signifying nothing. Today I can spend a day being two people, eat milk duds for lunch, and laugh until I nearly cough up my pancreas. Surely the way nature intended it. Or maybe nature intends nothing. Certainly seems that way.
You’re right. Nature intends nothing. We make it what it will be. Agrarian simplicity or urban complexity - it’s the choices we make. Hard to put your finger on just what that ought to be, no?
Au contraire, Gamer. These men Pythagoras, Melissus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, et al. were all travelers and very busy fellows as politics and economics were taking off when they started philosophizing. You are right on one thing, though. You set up the scenario of a group of people (Xanderman, You, De trop, Dunamis) living in the woods thousands of years ago: the only difference between you guys and the greek fellows was you were living in isolation and they were not, they were being exposed to other cultures/cities. This exposure, some speculated, fostered the start of philosophical activities.
