PHILOSOPHY–A PROSE POEM

Philosophy is a tricky balance of viewing human life from without and from within. It’s tempting to say it involves both ways of viewing simultaneously, but that’s trickier still. It may not even be possible to do. We may achieve an illusion of simultaneity, but it’s more likely a fluttering between the two.

There’s a paradox involved, like with almost everything. Philosophy starts with the attempt to glimpse life from without. That is, to view life from outside of life. That, too, is likely impossible, but it can be approximated. It involves objectifying life as a thing apart from the living of it, the experiencing of it. It is out of body, out of mind, even almost out of consciousness. But never completely out of consciousness, because some organ has to remain to do the viewing. It is out of ordinary consciousness, because ordinary consciousness is consumed with and dominated by content of ordinary living. Ordinary consciousness is devoted to and is in the service of life as organism. Philosophy wants to look at the organism itself, examine human life as a person might examine a butterfly or a bee.

So the philosopher tries to step outside and look back at what he or she just vacated, the thing he or she so recently occupied. What or who is doing the looking? Whatever was conscious within the thing, but now freed of only serving the organism, freed to look at the organism and its shadow consciousness still serving the organism.

Okay. This is probably far enough to exceed the tolerance level of most reasonable readers. What gobbledygook. Is there possibly any practical message in this spinning of words? Anything to further an understanding of philosophy or human life or anything at all?

If so, it is this—the abstract, obtuse spinning of words and of wheels represents the semi-futility of philosophy. Only “semi,” though, and that limited to the species of philosophy that claims to explain anything. We are sometimes told philosophy seeks answers to ultimate questions as to what is real, what is right, and how we recognize real, right, or anything else. It doesn’t do that. All it does is seek to show how we seek to answer ultimate questions, recognizing all the while we can’t answer the questions themselves. We can only examine the process of interrogation.

The answers are, in fact, beside the point. Or maybe better put that the answers are found in exposing the process by which we seek them.

We can wiggle outside life enough to see it as thing, but never without an umbilical tethering us to the thing. That umbilical insists on injecting inside-life forces and feeders into the freed-up, stripped-down consciousness. So we never succeed fully at seeing life as thing. We can only approach it to the extent of objectifying its processes as organism. We can come closer than we ever do in non-philosophical mode, but we must remain thing trying to see and absorb thing’s essence as if we were outside the thing.

That’s why we started with the conceit of philosophy as a view of human life from outside and from inside simultaneously. But the very limitation imposed by the umbilical joining out and in also provides philosophy’s greatest strength and asset. That is humanization.

Oh lord. So we humanize by trying our best to dehumanize, to objectify our lived experience into thing? That’s right. At least, it’s the opinion of this one person as to the process.

Philosophy is to get at the machinery of human life. To the extent it succeeds, it does so at the cost of exposing the thingness of life. It exposes the machined creations by which we live and cope and thrive or fail to thrive, lays them bare as creations and illusions, and therefore seems to make them banal. It appears to make them farcical.

A mother’s love for her child? Indistinguishable from a border collie’s corralling of sheep, or from a bee’s gathering of flower fluids. By no means crude or ugly, just no longer special or mysterious or magical or exceptionalizing. Not truly banal or farcical, just made to seem so by loss of our ordinary elevation of a mother’s love to some godlike, ethereal realm. It’s vital for us to perceive something godlike and ethereal in ourselves and our positioning in relation to each other and the world. Meaning and purpose require for us more than the rote and the instinctual.

Philosophy gives the lie to the illusion that we are more than the rote and the instinctual. It reveals that the mysterious, the magical, the godlike, the ethereal are the creations of our instinct, conjured from wish and believed into realness. The bee gathers flower fluids to sustain life. We gather beliefs to sustain life. We don’t individually have to create them—they were created when the species first acquired enough consciousness to become conscious of self. That accretion of neurons sufficient to tip our forerunners past mere instinct to live to the point of instinct to wonder why we live. In short order, meaning and purpose coalesced, never having existed before because never having been needed before. Belief provided the now-necessary meaning and purpose. The categories of belief likely proclaimed themselves almost immediately, all borne of the first dawning of the question, “Why do we live?” Religion, ethics, social rules, politics, power, organization, clanship, friendship, enmity erupted, and all belief since has been refinement of the particulars but not the substance.

“Why do we live?” gave new dimension to fear and hope. Fear and hope were limited to the concrete business of mere organism before we reached that pivot point of enough neurons for self-consciousness. Overnight, fear and hope spawned abstractions beyond the mechanics of organic existence. Mind came into being, and with it, belief.

That is the view from without. Human life as thing, self-imagined so it can be self-sustaining and self-justifying. Believed into shape and form.

The umbilical is what spares the philosopher from being crushed by the view from without. The umbilical still injects life-from-within forces and feeders, injects just enough to sustain belief in spite of the philosopher’s realization that belief is a charade. Belief believes in itself for its own sake and for the sake of the neuron-burdened believing organism. It must, or the organism perishes from despair, from lack of meaning and purpose.

That’s the beauty of philosophy. It exposes illusion but doesn’t, can’t, eradicate it. Illusion creates meaning and purpose. Philosophy discloses all three, illusion, meaning, and purpose, as fabrications. But fabrications are a species of thing. Things exist. Love, honor, virtue, respect are all abstract fabrications, but all as real as the mind that made them up. The umbilical infuses compassion and empathy for the frailty and fragility of shared human life built on insubstantial things. Philosophy says, “Not at all what it seemed. But good enough.”

Written December 14, 2022
©2022 by Lawrence Helms