Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher I have become familiar with a Turkish proverb: “He who knows the road does not join the caravan.” It came to mind last week when I was pondering the course this column has so far traced. In particular, it caused me to wonder about the fellow who doesn’t know the road, but doesn’t want to join the caravan, either, who wants to discover the road for himself.

In real life, of course, that could prove dangerous. Luckily, marauding brigands pose no threat for mental excursions. So the premise of this column — to follow a train of thought (a mental roadway if you will) and see where it leads — seems safe enough. Nevertheless, I am almost always surprised to find where I end up.

The quotes I choose for my point of departure are usually ones I think I agree with or at least understand. But writing about them makes it necessary to think about them and thinking about them often leaves me wondering about them. By the time I got to the end of the column I wrote about Lord Falkland’s dictum — “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change” — I wasn’t at all sure that was always such a good idea.    

Perhaps even more interesting — at least to me — is the direction in which the sequence of columns has taken me. After all, one quote often leads to another and the choice is bound to reflect my own preferences and predilections. But one is not always as conscious of those as one might suppose. The columns I have so far written make plain that certain leitmotifs govern my thinking.

I am suspicious of systems of thought. My suspicion is grounded in the sense that they impose an order on reality rather than derive one from it. Such systems are invariably rational systems, and I also doubt our reasoning faculty is capable of comprehensively grasping the order of reality. So color me skeptical. I think we can get a “feel” for the nature of reality by means of the imagination, which brings together all the ways by which we are consciously aware of it — reason, sensation, emotion, memory, and experience — and draws as well on that mysterious something called the unconscious.

The inspiration for the column was Montaigne’s early essays, in which he took a quotation and recorded the train of thought it triggered. I thought that no one since had really followed his example and written essays as a method of philosophizing (and not just for the exposition of a philosophical position already arrived at). But I was wrong. I have recently discovered that a fellow named Gaston Bachelard used what he called reverie as a method for phenomenology.

Now, a good part of the two years during which I studied philosophy in college were spent on phenomenology. The textbook for the course I had in epistemology was William A. Luijpen’s Existential Phenomenology. It actually isn’t a textbook and, while the second part of it deals with epistemology, that is not its subject. It is really about how to philosophize.

“Philosophizing always means personal experience and expression of the wealth of being,” Luijpen writes. In other words, while it is certainly useful to become acquainted with various systems of thought, authentic philosophy means thinking through the problems posed by philosophy on one’s own and arriving (or not) at one’s own conclusions.

I have been re-reading Luijpen’s book and find myself surprised to discover how much it has shaped my thinking. I’m surprised because, God knows, I argued about it enough with Father Edward Gannon, the Jesuit priest who taught that course in epistemology and who was probably the greatest teacher I ever had (and I had some very good ones). Father Gannon had chosen Existential Phenomenology as a textbook precisely to get across to us the point that in philosophy you’re on your own.

Last weekend, much of what I have been saying here coalesced in an email exchange with my friend Dave Lull. I had sent Dave a copy of my most recent (but not yet published) column. We had quite a back and forth. Dave made sharp observations and raised serious questions, not the least having to do with whether or not I was rubbing elbows with F.H. Bradley’s idealism. Neither of us was out to convince the other of anything (though Dave did help me notice that I had failed to explain a key term). We just explored a train of thought together.

It was fun. It was enlightening. And it reminded me of something: The essay (or reverie) may be a perfectly sound method of philosophizing, but so, too — as Plato knew better than anyone — is the dialogue.

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Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson // 1 Comment »