A Pretentious Title About Philosophy

I walk the dog every morning. Most mornings, we walk up the French Quarter and out to the Mississippi River, and walk along it a little way. In the winter months, this is close to sunrise. I usually stop, take a picture of the dog with the sunrise in the background, and post the photo to instagram with “Good Morning” as a caption. It’s the closest thing I have these days to a religious practice; it’s a simple affirmation, reminding myself that I live somewhere I have chosen to live, which despite its stresses is a genuinely neat place, and I would do well to remember that; along with some other things. Like a lot of people, I sometimes entertain fantasies of being in some other place, which is always idyllic. The reality of being in said other place would likely be quite different, and I’d be pining for some other thing in short order. Better to remember to remain here, as here isn’t bad.

If that all sounds a little philisophical, it’s because I am just wrapping up my first semester as a philosophy student. I never finished my original undergraduate degree (in English), and was given a fair amount of credit for my previous work, so I am finishing (I hope) in a different, though kind of related discipline. Philosophy involves a lot of reading; I read a lot of excerpts and articles, Plato’s “The Republic”, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”, a not too bad overview called “Philosophy in the Ancient World: an Introduction”, a Logic textbook the name of which escapes me, etc. Those are some of it for the things I read for classes; for papers I had to write for said classes, I read even more. Most of this semseter has focused on the ancients. I also read some things out of interest in my chosen major, a couple of books on the philosophy of music, Bertrand Russel’s “The Problems of Philosophy” and so on.

I also had to write a fair bit; reading and writing “for pleasure” largely went out the window. Looking over my Storygraph for this year, there’s a sharp drop in ‘fun’ at the start of September, and a sharp rise in ancient Greek. I still got a few in, notably the new Knausgaard (which was… ok, but this new series of his is wearing a little thin), and the new Nick Cutter, which I enjoyed a lot at the time, but am struggling to remember details of.

As for the practicality of a philosophy degree, I have no thoughts. I’m lucky that, at least now, practicality doesn’t weigh too heavily on my list of considerations for doing things. My friend convinced me to pursue the degree, saying “what does it matter on the back nine?” (A thought I will return to in a bit). And academia, though I sometimes dislike it for reasons too long winded to go into here, isn’t as terrible as I imagined. I’ve fucked up on a couple of assignments and handed them in late, but am mostly a solid B plus student. It’s not a bad thing to be doing.

As to “why philosophy?” well, it’s just something that fascinates me in a way that things occaionally do. I get asked if I have a favorite philosopher, the answer is no, if I have one I hate, the answer is Descartes, and if I am interested in a specific thing, and the answer is I don’t know for sure, but the idea of the ontology of music is a thing I’ve read a couple of books on “for fun” so maybe that. Music has been a constant force for good in my life, I’d like to know, in a philisophical sense, what its nature is. Is that possible? No clue. An intstagram account I follow, of a fellow student, sort of compared being a philosophy student to learning to cook– you gather ingredents, and the knowledge of them, and learn to put them together. The actual creative, chef-fy part comes along after that. I’m a prep cook, at best.

There’s a notion that philosophers sit in leather armchairs in comfortable libraries and attempt to figure out the meaning of life, and there may be some that do this. But there are also ones who attempt to figure out how “P^Q ∴ ~A” (I can hear my logic professor shrieking at me as I type this, as it’s actual nonsense, but if I put in a real logical expression, I’d be compelled to explain it and you’d stop reading if you haven’t already), others who might ask “how do we determine if animals are sentient, and what are the implications of that?” and so on; the list is endless. Wittgenstein thought he had figured it all out, and was really dissapointed when he did. Later, he thought what he had figured out was wrong; I have not gotten further than that in the biography of Wittgenstein I am reading to let you know if he was dissapointed in the new set of answers he came up with; I do know he died before they were published, and entire schools of thought have risen and fallen on the basis of the two books that he published. For the record, I am sitting on a beanbag.

The meaning of life, I thought I had it figured out a few times. I guess I have that in common with Wittgenstein (though to be fair, his work isn’t so much about the meaning of life as it is about the meaning of language. Until it isn’t). But it’s not really why I am studying philosophy. It’s likely if I did figure it out, I’d be dissapointed, in any case. It’s likely not all that profound; most of the times I’ve thought I have grasped it, its been simple enough: there is none, God, and there is none, but God anyway have all taken a turn in the barrel, and none of those are complex notions. And now, I am on the back nine, writing about long dead Greeks, without answers.

There was a blogger named Donald Crowdis, in the early 2000s. He was notable at the time, as he was a nonagenarian blogging in the fairly “new” internet space that blogging took up. He wrote a fairly famous entry about dying called “It Bothers Me That I Have To Go”, which is one of the most succinct thoughts about the human condition I can imagine. I am, I hope, not near death, but I am at the stage of my life where one realizes that you have more years behind you than you have ahead of you. And it bothers me that I have to go, and that when I do, I may still be a prep cook.

Good Morning.