I’m back--after a suitably nine-month period of gestation--with what passes in my case for clarity and resolve. My occasional scattered musings have of late become more regular. In the process their circularity has become obvious. The only cure for this is to give them an outlet. For the present it will be here. But first I have these four loosely connected sketches to get shed of:-one-Boethius sits alone in his cell. It is early in the sixth century. It is dark. The age is dark, though scholars have not yet given it that name. It is a dark time for Boethius. His master, the emperor Theodoric, has condemned him to death. A single window, too high to look out, admits a narrow wedge of gray sky. The dungeon smells of mold and sewage. Old prisoners curse. Mad ones shriek. Daylight fades. A keeper comes down the damp stone steps and sets a smoldering torch into the wall outside the bars.Boethius gathers his scrolls and his pens, and moves closer to the light. His tears pour out as verse upon the page. Suddenly a woman stands before him, her eyes burning with suprahuman in- sight. It is Dame Philosophy. She banishes the muses of poetry who have been enabling his self-pity. "It is time for healing, not lamenting," she says. "Were you not brought up on the milk of my learning?"Flash forward. It is the middle of the twentieth century. I am a pimply adolescent. I come home from school to find a package addressed to me. In it are books I ordered from the back of a magazine. Cheap editions of Bacon, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thoreau. Sharing space in one of the volumes is something called the Consolation of Philosophy. It is the last testament of a man awaiting execution. I begin to read. The words speak to me in my own prison of circumstance. I cannot put the book down.As much as I am wary of the person who lives by only one book, I have never ceased to read the Consolation with pleasure and profit. If I had to take a single book with me to prison or to war, it would be that last great work of antiquity and first great work of the middle ages which Boethius wrote in extremis.Yet the book was from the first a source of scandal for me. There is not in it one whisper of the Christian faith I was steeped in, and in which I found so little relief from my congenital misery. Boethius was putatively a Chrisitan, as was all of Roman officialdom under the Ostrogoth Theodoric. Indeed, Boethius seems to have earned his death by defending the orthodox view of the unity of Christ with God against the Arian heresy that Theodoric held to. So why did he fall into the embrace of the pagan Sophia instead of commending his soul to Jesus?The wise answer is that in those days no sharp boundary existed between faith and reason. Science had not yet risen from the ashes of the middle ages to challenge biblical faith. That may be. For me, though, the gentle counsel of the mother of all philosophers came like a fresh breeze through the bars of my cage. I saw for the first time that it was possible to find truth and virtue not in the authority of church or family but by the power of my own nascent mind.The Islamic mystic ibn Arabi speaks of something he calls the "theophanic imagination," the capacity of the mind's creative power to make God manifest in our presence. The artistry of Boethius was such that philosophy was made real to me, emerging like a jinni from a parcel post on my doorstep. It was on the strength of this encounter that I made my one and only honest declaration of vocation. It didn't go well.You have to know some things about my parents. For one, they didn't live together. In the whole of my conscious existence they spent only one year under the same roof. That's not to say they were divorced, or even separated in the usual sense of the word. They had an arrangement, though no one ever said exactly what it was. Officially, it had to do with religion. My mother as a new Catholic could no longer live with a man who had once been married to a woman who was still alive. The fact that my father wouldn't have stayed around even if she'd let him didn't come up. My father's view of it was that she was crazy.The other thing is that they were smart people. My mother had been educated in the classics at Wellesley; my father in politics and history on the cable desks of a half-dozen newspapers. Between them there was scarcely anything they did not know at least something about.In those days I was living with my mother in a tiny apartment in a small town in western New York. My father worked in Buffalo, drove down on weekends in his little Austin A-40 to spend a day with us. Often it was only part of a day. A Sunday afternoon perhaps. Dinner in the cramped front room which was at once kitchen, parlor and the place where my mother slept at night on a narrow folding cot. With the leaves of the table raised there was barely room for the three of us to squeeze into our chairs.On one of these occasions, after we had chewed on pot roast with carrots and onions, I announced my intentions: "I want to be a philoospher."It is possible this statement was followed by a silence, a hesitation in which my most heart-felt wish had a chance to live. But memory records no such thing. My father's response was instantaneous, as if he saw me coming. "You'll want to study science then," he said. "That's all that philosophy is anymore--natural philosophy."I was trumped. I hadn't seen him coming; I never could. But a boy with a healthy ego would have used this obstacle as an opportunity for defiance: "Damn you, sir," I might have said. "Philosophy is what I want, and I shall have it."My mother, who was usually looking for some break in the cloud of apapthy that hung over me, chose not to defend my sudden interest in life, perhaps on the ground that it was good for me to have some paternal influence for a change. Yet she was selling me short. It was she who had read Cicero in the original, Nietzsche in translation. She was the one who had met Will Durant, and who could drop names like Heraclitus and Anselm into a bedtime story. And her daily ingestion of the risen God inside the unleavened bread had alerted me to the distinction between appearance and reality. I suspect she knew that it was precisely the impact of these things on me that my father was so eager to squelch.Still, it was an extraordinary moment. I'm confident that on that Sunday few families in North America got as close as we did to the central intellectual problem of Western civilization. Even fewer got there so quickly.I have to give my father credit for this. He was entirely self-taught. For that reason he knew the world as it actually was. What's more, he thought of the world the way the world thought of itself. The Enlightenment had won him over, just as the counter-Reformation had won my mother over. For that reason he knew that transcendeence was entirely gone out of modern thought. He was not interested in bringing it back. He considered any attempt to do so foolhardy. What's more, he feared I was just such a fool as would try to. The speculative, he was gently reminding me, had been entirely swallowed by the empirical.In point of fact, I had no idea what being a philosopher meant, or even what philosophers did. Indeed, it seemed to me important that philosophers not do anything. Their job was to know things, big satisfying things. Doing things, being involved in politics, was what got Boethius in trouble. Remembering the truths of philosophy made him calm in the face of a cruel unjust death.These were not truths to be found inside the nucleus of the atom or the nucleus of the cell. They were truths hidden in the mind, accessible only to the mind, to a special kind of mind, one suckled and disciplined by the goddess of wisdom.Boethius tells us that on the bottom hem of Philosophy's garment was embroidered the Greek letter Pi, while at the top was the letter Theta. These stood for the practical and theoretical aspects of knowledge. Practice at the bottom, theory at the top. Between them were markings like the rungs of a ladder which showed how one might climb from the lower principle to the higher. I immediately punched the button for the top floor; I would have nothing less.It did not occur to me that my father might have been suggesting a strategy for working my way up the ladder. He probably wasn't. He was a practical man. Science was practical, a good place for a bookish boy to learn some usefull skills and not end up a bum, especially a bum with a college degree. I retreated quickly from my declaration, filled with the shame I always felt when he showed me up for being naive.Only recently did I discover that for Boethius the natural sciences were part of the theoretical side of philosophy. The top not the bottom. This is a connection largely broken in modern times. Indeed Boethius had it that the practical basis of philosophy was not the tedious sciences but ethics and the moral life. Only the good got to ascend the ladder to the realm of pure speculation. I have always prefered to ignore that point.Boethius would have insisted I had nothing to choose between philosophy and science, but only between duty and indolence. My father's view of it was that there was no other knowledge than that of science. I heard something different. I heard the beautiful lady in the embroiderd cloak whispering of a kind of knowledge that goes beyond experience. That was what I wanted, and what I have tried for ever since.-two-In one sense my encounter with Boethius is the beginning of my story. But only chronologically, and even that has a pre-history (as we shall shortly see). Besides, as Feuerbach says, "Is it not after all a presupposition that philosophy has to begin at all?"Aristotle says that philosophy (more on this term later) begins in wonder. That means we have to have some wonder. It's wonder that we loose quickest in life. Grownups give us names for things. Names seem like explanations. Names impose order on chaos. Indeed without names we cannot express our wonder at a nameless universe. In the beginning was the word, it says somewhere.The beginning of my wonder goes like this: I am a child. It is evening. I sit in the low crook of a horse-chestnut tree, looking at the sky. The air is mild, the breeze light. This is an early memory. I am perhaps four. The house where I live with my mother is tall and narrow, rising above flat farmland along the southern shore of Lake Ontario just west of Rochester.The sun hangs, then drops, smearing the horizon with melted orange crayon. Overhead the sky darkens toward indigo. Distant sounds float past: a truck gathering speed on the Ridge Road; cattle coming in for milking on an adjacent farm. Farther off, a world I do not yet know is at war. All at once I glimpse the birth of night from day. I have no words for this. My body aches to know, yearns, yawns, explodes. I am me.This is of course an entirely manufactured moment. I do not say false or fictional. But it exists in memory as a composite of a thousand contemplated sunsets in the years since, sunsets that the mature self takes as occasion for reflection or reinvention. Indeed, this same sunset had most likely happened a hundred times before under the coaching of grownups who ooh-ed and aah-ed their own wonder at the beauty of nature or the pain of existence. But this sunset was entirely my own doing like finally riding a bicycle without training wheels.What I did next with my tiny new consciousness is less clear. Chances are I lost it in the grass like a leaden soldier and forgot to look for it after my mother called me in to supper. I am easily distracted from the things I value most.I first wrote down this story in an attempt to fulfill my daughter's wish to learn more about my side of the family. It says a lot that I should begin at such a moment. But you have to listen to the silences. Where is my father? We know that ten years later he shows up like Socrates' daimon to warn me off from a career in philosophy. And why is my beautiful, highly educated mother cooking on a wood stove and pumping water from a cistern?There are answers to these questions. Or at least there were then. Answers that made sense. Or seemed to make sense. But with time they have only invited more questions. This is enough to send a child on a path of inquiry. Or perhaps turn him into a more skillful liar.I want to come back to this business of names. Are they just arbitrary? Or does it matter what we call things? Does the name stand for the thing? Would any other name do as well? Or smell as sweet? In particular what is this thing I want so badly? I have called it philosophy becasue that’s what everone else calls it. I would rather find another name. Not the least of my reasons for disliking the word is that most people dislike the things it signifies. I dislike most of them too. It may be easier for us to get on with our thinking if we refrain from words that conjure such unpleasant associations. Besides, a huge part of the output of contemporary philosophy is devoted to whether such an activity is possible at all. Why not come up with a word for that which we actually are able to do, then get on with it.A big problem with the word philosphy is that we've cut the ground out from under it. Every set of hazy assumptions is dressed up as philosophy. The person who cuts your hair has a philosophy taped to the mirror above the Barbisol comb jar: "We shall snip no strand before its time." This is philosophy as mission statement. Whatever sounds puffed up and easy to ignore is palmed off as philosophy.But behind the word lies the reality. Or at least the things most of us think of when we hear the word. Professors and obscure tomes and pointless debates. Why shouldn't we be put off? Academic turf wars have left philosophy departments with nothing to do, and no microscopes with which to look for stuff that small. Under current rules of the game, universal knowledge can only beat specialized knowledge by becoming specialized. To the extent that philosopy tries to play on that level it fails. Yet its big constructs fall unheard in a forest which no one can see for the trees.All this is fine, but like everything else it's really about me. The word makes me nervous because I feel inadequate to it. I'm afraid people will laugh. You can't call yourself a philosopher; it's a title others have to confer on you. So what do you call yourself instead? In my case the best label might be "meaning freak."For another thing there are some events in the tournament I can't or won't enter. I'd like to change the rules so the bar can't be set above my level. Sort of like a special competition for the differently-abled.I'm afraid that what comes next will sound like the flap over Classic Coke. Will renaming the product make it more tasty? Probably not. But it might help people know what they're getting before they pop a top. And maybe a few who've never tried home brew will take a sip or two.Of course, it's going to be hard to shake loose a term that's as rooted in tradition as philosophy is. Fortunately there's a deeper stream we might tap into. In the sixth and seventh centuries BC thinkers in Greek colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean laid the foundations of experimental and rational science. But they did not call this activity philosophy.One of them, Parmenides, applied the word aletheia to this new intellectual trend. In common usage the word meant exposure in the sense of undressing or uncovering. Disclosure might be another meaning. As Ortega y Gasset puts it, "Aletheia presents philosopy for what it is--an endeavor at discovery...to place us in contact with reality itself." It was, he says, philosophy's "true or authentic name and thus its poetic name."I like this. It's time-honored. Yet it is free of the barnacles that cling to the rusting hulk of the Good Ship Philosophy. Even so I must note Heiddeger's caution: "An appeal to the meaning of aletheia accomplishes nothing, and will never produce anything useful." And he should know.All the same, I would if I could simply banish the word philosophy, shake out its empty contents like a vacuum cleaner bag. But then what? What would I be talking about? It would have to have a name.Words like inquiry and reflection would serve well enough, if not better. This leaves the door open for scientists, artists, preachers, farmers, politicians, pharmacists, parents, bankers, soldiers and ambulatory schizophrenics to contribute to that common understanding in which wisdom resides.If the above bears strong resemblance to the current state of intellectual life, I rest my case. For just what does the philosopher add to this mix? And could they do it just as well if they were called something else?If we are to have no philosophers, what will we have? Perhaps we should apply names like inquirer, investigator, explorer, systematizer, visionary, mystic, aphorist, pundit, sage, critic, comic, clown, fraud, analyzer, synthesizer, healer, friend, or idler as seems appropriate. These are more specific, and specificity always helps when it comes to The Activity Formerly Known As Philosophy.Indeed it may be that the true philosophers aren't called philosophers anymore, but engineers and physicians and cartoonists.Then what are we to do with the people who do call themselves philosophers, assuming that sending them down for re-education by doing manual labor among the masses is not an option?Suppose we settled on the term "inquiry" in place of "philosophy". What if a university department of philosophy then hung out a new shingle as the Department of Inquiry? Most likely all the other disciplines would object and demand to be called the same thing.We can take it in the other direction. How would a gang of unemployed former philosphers sell their services to a university that had stripped them of their mantles? How about setting them- selves up as the Department of Magic? They could teach students how to pull Nothingness out of Being. (Or is it the other way around?)I jest. Better they should present themselves as the Department of Archaic Inquiry to stress their value in alerting students to the longevity of intellectual scams. Or perhaps as the Department of Deep Inquiry--alternately Far Inquiry--to show how their work differs from the busy industry of the specialized fields.One can also imagine there being a Department of Transcendence, in honor of the one unassailable (becasue invisable) fortress of the philosophers. Such a department would no doubt be devoted to anti-empirical, or at least un-empirical, studies. Some qualifier would have to be added to the label to distinguish this activity from the mummery that goes on in divinity schools. So we might have programs in Secular or Rational or Dialectical Transcendence.My vote would go for calling this new critter the Department of Speculation (as long as it wasn't based in the business school). Speculation, in the sense of vision, is what we need most as we try to navigate the sea of data.Unfortunately this exercise would do more good for sign painters than it would for the way we educate people (ourselves). If God (or the Devil) is in the details, so are the important questions. It is precisely in the study of subatomic particles and expanding universes that we should dwell on the meaning of conscious existence. The philosophers need to be working in the physics departments. And the philosophy departments need to be staffed by those neurobiologists and demographers who have bothered to ask the right(!) questions.What's my stake in this? Sour grapes and unrequited love. When my parents squelched my ambition to be a philosopher I shrank from it. I lacked initiative and conviction. I was too timid to express my identity outloud.Because I could not attain philosophy I wish to destroy it. Or at least reduce it to an activity within my scope of indifference and inertia. The technical is too tedious; the profound and visionary, suspect. I want it easy. I want it to come to me. My reductionism is grammatical: I will admit only the question.Still, there is something I will work for besides food--what may be called the aesthetic of inquiry. As a sevententh century version of the Marquis d’Halifax described it, "The struggle for knowledge hath a pleasure to it like that of wrestling with a fine woman." (Yes, I know this betrays gender bias. Its point is still valid.)Unfortunately in my case this is a private delight, a sense of privilege and exclusivity, a soft muzziness (much despised by professional philosophers) that emerges in the midst of dreamy explorations. I do philosophy like a tourist at the ruins. There are guide books and markers, but nothing to be discovered. And anyway I make no effort even to discover what is well known. I simply soak up the ambience, the sense of grandeur, while I eat my lunch. I am vaguely uplifted. I promise I will come back when I can stay longer. I decline the opportunity to help excavate the foundations.So I am an amatuer, a dilettante, a customer of the real philosophers. It is not my worst crime. Yet as I confess it, I wish there were a politics of identity for all of us who suffer in this way. If only our shame could be turned into pride and special access provided to the most airy realms of discourse, then we might feel less pain at living in this most utillitarian of times.-three-I cannot say whether what I propose to do will be of any use. If there are limits to be explored, they are my own. I do not know if anyone else is confronted with these same limits. The desire to push beyond one’s limits is not uncommon. It is more difficult when we feel compelled to push beyond limits that we cannot name.I am limited by my ability to feel or experience or imagine. It seems to me that beyond these limits lies some absolute limit, a wall I cannot pass through, a floor that bears me up. Something to push against. A foundation.Yet I know that for a bird in flight its foundation is thin air. We have no foundation but the metabolism of our cells fueled by the fruits of our labor. And these are given to us. We are pretty well unable to step off this treadmill. When we seek foundations it is not (despite what we pretend) for Being or Existence, but for Thought which seems to burst from our brows fully formed.Full disclosure: When I claim to be in search of foundation it is not so that I may stand firmly upon it in order to move forward. Rather it is so that I may rip up the paving stones and use them to beat friends and enemies alike senseless. Fortuntely I am unlikely to do much damage so long as my tools and materials remain safely locked within my mind.Of course, the chaos to which I aim to bring order is of my own making. Mostly. For there is chaos to spare all around. Much of mine is borrowed from the confusions of history and the conflicts of the times. Indeed, the world is in play, unthinkably so. The final arrogance would be to claim that the exegesis of my futility matters in the course of events. It doesn’t, but it might amuse.I’ll begin (or begin again, for this narrative like life itself is nothing but a series of beginnings) with what could be called the Principle of Insufficient Reason (i.e, we have no reason that is sufficient) There is no foundation for existence. At least none that can derived from the activities by which we exist or are conscious of our existence. I say this in order to dispose quickly of Substance, whether Cartesian or Aristotelian. But can all, then, be Form? Perhaps, if it is that Form that continually emerges as the leading edge of Process. In this way Substance is implication rather than entity. Enough! for this is more or less the trick which Nietzsche tries to play.Mentioning Nietzsche reminds me that there is a certain willfulness to this project of mine--the effort to subdue the world by overwhelming its narrative. And this is as good a place as any to point out the obvious: both my problem and my chronic failure to address it come from an insufficient development of, and even more paltry application of, my will. Part of the appeal of this work (which you will find me at times refering to as "the work") is in the fact that it would require such extreme exertion that my own fear and lethargy would be erased. I find this reason enough to shrink from the task.Allow me to illustrate. I have for a long time rejected, though not refuted, the religion of my upbringing. This is to no small extent involves sloppy thinking. But then my religious life was permeated with sloppy thinking. I can trace the thread a little way back. In my childhood reading of the Baltimore Catechism I ran across the notion of Limbo, a place where dwelt those who deserved neither reward nor punishment. The categories of those to be found there included some folks called Good Pagans. My immediate and entirely naive instinct was to want to be one. Little did I know that I was revealing to myself a glimmer of my deepest inclination. I prefered the Sages to the Saints. In time I exercised to option to become a pagan, though never a good one. And while I might seem to have chose Reason over Faith, my reasons were never rational but rather willful and self-indulgent. But there is an element of the inquisitive in the descent into depravity--a way to find what is more authentic if not stronger or deeper in myself. (In this regard, see the 1946 essay "On Decadence" by Sakaguchi Ango, in which he argues that only buy sinking into the depths of immorality can the defeated Japanese cleanse themselves of the social programming that lead them into disaster, thereby discovering their true humanity.)Much later, when my final crisis of faith did come, I claimed to be reaching out to what was "autonomous and central" in my "nature" (problematic constructs that invite exploration). In part this was a re-identification with those ethical humanists of antiquity who had caught my fancy as a boy. But I was also taking hold of a discovery that came during my (Jesuit) college metaphysics course. I had waited eagerly for this chance to go into the heart of (Scholastic) philosophy as taught by (presumed) experts. I was not disappointed. But the more I inderstood the concept of Being as the ground of existence, the more I came to equate it with that other Ultimate Reality, the Big Guy Himself. Of course, a logical conclusion is a bit pale next to a thundering potentate of all that can be surveyed. It was my own private Ontological Proof (... that than which nothing).By now one can smell heretic slow-roasting over a bed of eternal flames. Here again I yield to my inherent tendencies. I seem to have been born a Gnostic. For me it was not an error but the way in which I held to truth. It’s variations abound.The business of heresies has always puzzled me. Not that I would make a case in favor of error. But why would God be offended if those who loved and served did so in not quite the right way? My answer used to be that such flawed doctrines were really evasions, willful refusals to submit to the uncomfortable but correct official view. Buried in each of these flaws was a seed of apostasy. Funny I should think this, headed as I was toward the exit. But I think now that these perversions of doctrine have each a certain profile, dare I say personality. To some extent the Church tries to accomodate these tendencies. Thus, gnostics may find work as contemplatives so long as they make no attempt to de-legitimate the power of the organization by pointing out that God is immediately available all the time without the need to make appointments through the parish secretary.In fact, I was for a time drawn to this aspect of the religious life. Characterisitcally I vacillated, partly becasue I sensed that I lacked a sufficiently completed personality to be capable of a commitment, let alone an effective life. I was acting out of inadequacy rather than generosity. I knew this. I just didn’t have any other idiom in which to work but the one of piety. Hence my sickness could only be evidence of my devotion. None of this took account of the sensualist lurking in the wings.It’s hard to know whether my mystical tendency was/is at root philosophical or religious. More seems to have gotten mingled in me at fertilization than chromosomes. Both my parents had strong, well formed outlooks. My mother’s spiritual, my father’s rational. Neither, however, was a reductionist; that was my own innovation.My philosophic path was never been one of exertion, only of escape. Thinking was the most pleasurable of my vices that was not officially a sin (though my Jesuit professors did caution against doing it alone). Curiously that was the one prohibition I had no compunction about ignoring. Early on it seemed to me that if I were capable of tossing about the heavy concepts as if they were beach balls, I would be freed of the weight of my own existence. What any fool except me could have seen was that what really bore me down was the terror of sex.So, when I came to the metaphysics portion of our guided tour through the statue garden of scholasticism I began to rub up against the cold marble obelisk of Being. Here was a knowable god who asked nothing in return. Its only acolytes were those, like me, who had the clarity to see what lay beyond seeing. Its church was only a thought away. This church had no rules, no board of directors to define how the altar was to be approached. Indeed, there was no distinction between altar and the object of devotion.Naturally I shrank from the this idol and hastened to the dark campus chapel, redolent of incense and bayberry. The God of Narrative welcomed me back. All was forgiven. Perhaps. But virginity once lost, remains lost. And the memories of pleasure linger all the more for being forsworn. Besides, thinking is like eating; one cannot simply abstain. I didn’t want a god whose stories I could enjoy; I wanted a god I could know, a god born out of my own head.Of course I got this approach to religion from my mother who had been occupied for most of my life with attaining sainthood. And not just any sainthood. She had chosen the way of mystical union with the Godhead. It was all I knew how to do. If I had had less of my father’s pragmatism and rationalism I might have stuck with her program. Besides I didn’t want Godhead, I wanted good head. I just couldn’t admit it to myself. Not yet.Let’s return to the little boy watching the sunset. It's time for some backstory. The little boy's mother died recently at age 97. He's not a little boy anymore. When he spoke at the family memorial luncheon after her ashes were intered in his father's grave at Arlington National Cemetery, he didn't mention his inability to forgive her, he used pictures from her scrapbook to sketch the unique things about her life. Her rural origins. Her hard work to get a classy classical education. Her early success as a newspaper drama critic. Her marriage to a successful newspaperman. Occassionaly he noted how carefully constructed this image was, as if she had applied to her life the same promotional exercises she participated in with regard to the celebrities of her day. He spent less time on himself and his childhood during which she experienced the failure of her marriage and immersed herself in Catholicism. He (that’s me, by the way) also ignored his own apostasy from that faith and his abandoment of his family. He ended with a few pictures of her, happy with grandchildren and great grandchildren, or involved in her service projects with prison inmates and neighborhood children. The last image was of the way she is memorialized on the walls of her local cathedral as part a display honoring a deceased pastor. A saintly woman, gone to her reward. So....Back there on that farm where my memory took shape, the situation was this. The Second World War was on. My father by this time had wrangled himself a commission in the army and was off ensuring the flow of armaments to troops overseas, and the flow of publicity to the local newspapers. He was what was known as a "retread." He had served in WWI. He was by now in his fifties. There was no requirement that he go off and leave his family in order to serve. Indeed his absence was scaredly noticed in one sense. He had not been around much for some time prior to the war.The farm had been his fall-back after he lost a job and was out of work for some years at the end of the Depression. When he finally found work on a newspaper in Buffalo, he didn't move my mother and me to the city but rather lived in a hotel through the week and visited us at the farm on weekends.I suppose I missed him. I don't remember. There exist a few post cards to me from him on his travels to various military bases around the country. I suspect my mother missed him greatly. Perhaps from love, but perhaps even more from a feeling she had been swinndled. She’d grown up on a farm, worked hard to escape. Now she was chopping wood and feeding chickens again. For a while she did have the company of my father’s grownup daughter from his first marriage. But then she enlisted in the army and was gone. My mother was bored and lonely and she had no respite from the care of a small child. Besides she had a sense of propriety. We belonged together as a family.I am rendering all this in from my adult perspective. I have not connected it to the central thread of the is story which is my terminal inquisitiveness. And it is mere telling. I have shown you nothing. To do so will require some invention.-four-Among the more peculiar of the several conceits I employ is the business of calling my activity on these pages "the work". This is in part a corollary of my desire to avoid, where possible, use of the term philosophy.That said, I’d still be better off to keep this particular piece of question-begging to myself, leave it buried in the agony of private journals. But it has been useful in getting at the few points I do have to offer (indeed it seems at times to be my only point). In any case it would be coy to present the edifice without at least a snapshot of the scafolding that made it possible.At its simplest, refering to what I aim to do as "the work" has the virtue of putting emphasis on the process rather than the result. But it also implies the result. The best I can make of it, this activity of mind-play that some of us indulge in has as its main benefit the refinement and fulfilment of conscious life.This is other than the manifest business of making sense of the world. Of course, we all want to do that. The big prize goes to the one who finds the key that unlocks the door to meaning. Yet if that discovery is to transform others it must first transform the discoverer. This is a lonely business. The fruit may rot before it gets to market. It’s best to stock your pantry from the garden.Scientists like to speak of the elegance of theories. They are driven as much as much by the esthetic of explanation as by the praise and profit that follow on success. All the more for the activity usually refered to as philosophy. There is great pleasure in searching for the boundaries of knowledge, especially when it involves pushing the limits of the knower. It might help if we thought of philosophy not as deficient science but as exalted art.It’s fun for me to write these words, to try to wrap my mind around the ideas they imply. I become more real to myself than at any other time. The pity is that I don’t do it oftener. But I am weak, easily distracted by other pleasures and fears.As a youth I read Aristotle’s claim that "philosophy begins in wonder." My heart soared. Yes, I thought, I too have wondered, trembled on the knife edge between Being and its Opposite. Thus, I must be a philosopher. Case closed. Wait for the state to grant me a stipend on which to pursue my thoughts. In time I noticed that I was way more interested in chasing girls and criticizing the government. The money I had gotten to do hard science I frittered away to the point I was no longer employable in my field. Now I understood that it was not wonder that philosophy began in but wonderfulness--the rich inner life of one who was capable of such soaring thoughts. It disturbed me to find there was something more than school smarts required for my prefered line of work. Call it character. But how to get it. I was a reasonably good citizen in the law-obeying department. But I was arrogant, timid, obsessive, lazy, lecherous, impatient, and had a short attention span.I had tried religion. Indeed I was at my most arrogant, timid and obsessive in this phase. I gave it up in order to be slothful, lascivious and angry. (As I said, I have never refuted the claims of relgion, only refused its discipline.)After that I checked out the various paths to the bottom of the heap. I enjoyed myself but tended to pull up just short of the slippery slope. This intrigued me. I’d been raised on the premise that small crimes turn into big ones. That it didn’t happen in my case may be the result of my timidity, but I credit the fact that I’m curious as well as querulous. At my most fragmented and distraught I tend toward reflection. When my life doesn’t make sense I begin to wonder if anything does. Then I start reading the people who’ve tried the trace the thread back to where it starts. Not for their answers, but to see how they asked the questions.That’s my center, the one part of me I’m not willing to sell off no matter how useless or unfulfilled. Of all the things I’ve encountered it is the one that drives me. I can hear an old-timey fiddle tune and tap my foot, but I have no desire to learn to play. But let someone propound a first pinciple and I want to make one of my own. It doesn’t matter that I can’t rub two ideas together long enough to start a fire.As much as this business is a vain affectation it also touches on something basic. And it’s the basic stuff we’re after, right? For one, there’s the old scholatic wheeze about Potency and Act. Thus the clay has the potential to be a pot but only through the action of the potter. The Efficient Cause imposes Form on inert and characterless Matter. Even a ill-defined lump of, say, elemental iron is in itself an amalgam of Prime Matter and Substantial Form--therein lies its Essence. The essence of iron lies not simply in the Idea of iron, or in its chemical and physical properties (themselves Accidents), but in the way primative, formless Matter bore the imprint of Iron-ness. Never mind that none of this can be demonstrated in the laboratory or the forge, it saves a larger theory in which the Substance of heavenly blood can have the Appearance of earthly wine. It also allows us to characterize the Supreme Being, the Unmoved Mover, as Pure Act, uncontaminated by the inert, unrealized possibilities of dull, boring stuff.This might all seem rather silly, but from it comes a principle af staggering simplicity and power: Being is as it acts. So from the subtlest metaphysics we get the foundation of empiricism and phenomenology. Huh!There are other ways of approaching this same point. Giambatista Vico’s New Science proclaims that we only understand what we have made. Nature is impenetable to our minds until we constuct a model which imitates its behavior. When our most advanced tool is the steam engine we live in a thermodynamic universe. In an age of computers both our brains and our galaxies are described as digital processors. Knowledge of the world is inseparable from our activity in the world, our production of things, even if they be things of the mind like narratives and equasions. How sad for a person like me who dislikes doing anything and yearns to grasp the sum of reality in a single intuition.My short leap from faith to ideology led me to the succinct question posed by Comrade Mao: "Where do correct ideas come from?" (Great question! If we knew its answer, we would know everything else, or at least how to find it.) The Chairman answers with two more (albiet rhetorical) questions: "Do they drop from the skies?" "Are they innate in the mind?" To each he answers a resounding, "No." Then he offers his answer. Correct ideas, he says, "come from social practice and from it alone..." As far as I’m concerned, that pretty well does it up, disposing in one swoop of any pretense religion and/or metaphysics might make to being sources of truth.Of course, it’s not true just because the Great Helmsman says it’s true. You’ll have to check it out for yourself. As you do, consider his next sentence: "It is man’s social being that determines his thinking."We are what we do. But is that all we are? Man does not live by bread alone (or as we shall see by baking it either). Of course there is much imbedded in us by tradition. We move forward by clinging to the past. But the past is just someone else’s practice. And notice: the operative word is social, not practice. This is not some empiricism or pragmatism. It is not a Cartesian foundation of reality on the irrefutable experience of inner consciousness. It is the verifiable consensus constructed by people whose work is connected and shaped by a shared narrative. It amounts to the definition of science.It didn’t hurt my acceptance of Mao’s position that the practice he refered to was the more or less conscious struggle of the humanity create its own history. As he put it, when "correct ideas....are grasped by the masses, these ideas are turned into a material force which changes society and changes the world." I liked this. I finally had something I was willing to get out of bed for.So why am I still splashing around in the shallow end of the Great Sea of Ontology? Mostly because I wasn’t terribly good at being a revolutionary. My brief foray into the class struggle chewed me up pretty badly. When I retreated to lick my wounds I found that my one consolation was in speculation. Was the Marxist view of consciousness correct? Was the dialectic of mind an outgrowth of the bicameral brain? How did Marx’ materialism differ from that of, say, Skinner? Did the failures of socialism owe as much to its theories as did its successes? Did its successes have anything to do with its theories?Thinking like this was proof enough that I was still a vacillating middle-class dillitante and not the Gramscian organic intellectual I had set out to be. What’s more, once I started to look into these questions I found how little I knew about any of the ideas or thinkers involved. It didn’t help that there was already a huge industry devoted solving these same puzzles. It turned out I wasn’t even a good consumer of its products, let alone a supplier of raw materials.What little I did glimpse of academic or journalistic debate on the Left dissatisfied me both politically and philosophically. I began to feel free to ask basic questions of my own. (This is usualy the turn which leads old radicals to conclude that the way the world is is the way it’s supposed to be. While I can see better both what’s good about the social order and how hard it is to change what’s bad, I’m still convinced that things will only get worse if we’re not fighting to make them better.And I still think that the heart of any program of resistance and transformation must be the elimination of a system that bleeds labor for the welfare of a few. Not to say that I have closed my mind on any question. Only that this little tuft of gathered wool is my one standard against which all ideas have to be measured. Of course I might yet become a sell-out to the established order. It’s just that so far there has been no market for my wares. (So, make me an offer....)One further caution: when I begin to sound like a sophomore in an all-night dormatory bull session, remember that with ideas, as with basketball, the college game is best.A sophomore, of course, is a "wise fool." in part from the same root in Greek which gives us philosophy, the "love of wisdom." Some of my distaste for the term philosophy comes from its coy use by those who market their learning by saying they are not yet wise, but merely humble seekers of wisdom. But it is not so bad, or so uncommon, to be a fool. Indeed, as Erasmus points out, it is largely folly that makes the world go round. I am content to remain a sophomore.Though not the sophomore I once was. I have glimpsed the consequences of ideas. I am still enough of a Marxist not to stand Hegel back on his head. I am also enough of a Marxist to believe that ideas rooted in human expereince can change the world. It is the human mind that turns iron into steel and cuts steel with acetylene to make weapons or tools as it choses.So when I enter the maze of specualtion I try to keep hold of at least one thread from the tapestry of history. Even timeless questions are asked in real time. We are inevitably engaged in events. Our questions as much as our answers are drawn from the deeper wells of hope and fear.Yet when the world plunges, as it has lately, into a free-fire zone of infinite possibility and rank danger, we need something to keep us from getting giddy or despondent. Why not ask fundamental questions about Mind and its step-child Existence?Who should do this? I’d like it to be all of us. Better we should get embroiled in a debate over the nature of ideas than that we expend the last drop of blood trying to extract the last drop of oil. But we don’t lack for things to kill each other over. If we haven’t yet gone to war over the distinction between the Nominalist and Realist positions, we have done it for sillier reasons. The last thing I want is higher-minded slaughter.As in most things, like plastic surgery or carpentry, we’re likely to turn the job over to the best qualiifed, or at least the most credentialed. That keeps us from having to do it ourselves. And since we write the contracts the results don’t usually look strange to us.So why do I want into the game? Is it not sufficient that there’s a shelf or two in any bookstore devoted to dense thoughty tomes of the sort I often buy but seldom read more than a few pages of? Why would I want to succeed at adding to this load of ballast? (Never mind the odds of surviving in the ring with a bunch of heavyweights who crush all newcomers but never succeed in knocking each other out.)Several reasons. One, it’s generally safer that trying to tackle the world head on (though the learned are more likely to be silenced than the ignorant). Two, nothing else that’s legal lowers my anxiety level as well. Three, if not me, then whom? (Especially since no one else sees things quite the way I do.) Four, I seem to have no other useful function--and I do so want one despite my anti-utilitarian pose.I recognize that ideas are mostly tangential to events. It’s only when people don’t like your ideas that they insist ideas have consequences, that is, cause harm to their version of the common good. So, rather than insist that my ideas will help you, or that my thinking will help your thinking, I’ll stick to thought as a form of practice, hence "the work".This puts it on a plane with meditation and yoga and rollerblading and painting in watercolors. Ways to reduce stress and re-integrate the self so as to be a more productive member of the workforce. Yes, the great labors of speculative and systematic thought have come to that--a hobby for weekenders.This is the sense in which I feel obliged to enter the world of the mind. We make songs or poems or pictures because our innermost being requires it of us. Not because the world is better if we do, but because our lives are worse if we don’t. So too with thinking. There is a level at which it becomes an end in itself. And my sole aim in doing this work is the pleasure of feeling more fully alive.Marx said, "Philosophy bakes no bread." True enough. Yet we do not simply bake bread so that we may bake more bread. There is pleasure in the baking as well as in the eating. So too with deep inquiry into everything including inquiry itself. The value of the work is in the doing.-30-
