Philosophy Final

 

Taking a beautiful hike with my dog in the woods, I stopped to listen to the wind rustle through the branches and the leaves.  I watched as the sunlight poked through the canopy coverage and scattered over the ground like the reflection off a disco ball.  My mind wandered back to when I used to take these types of hikes with my family when I was a little girl.  How much I hated hiking and couldn't wait to be done with the trip so I could get back into a hotel room with air conditioning and good cooked meals instead of the constant heat, the embarrassment of using the bathroom in the woods, and the jaw numbing granola that never stopped needing chewing.  I started to think about how much I wish I had enjoyed those hikes when I was little.  How much I should have relished in those years of being taken care of by my parents and the innocence I had before I had so many different experiences that made me grow up.  

I thought about some philosophers that I had recently learned about in my philosophy class at school.  What would they say about my desires to go back to being a child?  Would things be easier or simpler if we only stayed as children?

If I could talk to some people about these questions I would want to talk to John Kaag, Susan Neiman, and Immanuel Kant.  This is what I think we might say:

Me: It's so nice to see everyone!  Thanks so much for talking with me Susan, John, and Immanuel.  You three have so much knowledge I'd love to ask you all some questions if that's alright?

S:  Of course!  It's always a pleasure to help someone figure out an answer to a question!

J:  We will definitely give it a shot!

Me:  So my first question I would like to get some clarity on is: What does it mean to grow up? and then a follow up is: Why should we?

S:  Oh I love these questions!!  You do know that I wrote a book called Why Grow Up right?  "If growing up, as I'll argue, requires a balance between is and ought, grown--up philosophy ought to be the best place to practise balancing.  In particular, it cannot make interesting claims about what ought to be without understanding what is.  This idea should be self-evident, but in a field that often pays less attention to the external world than to offering proofs of its existence, it's worth emphasizing."

I:  The reason you want to go back to your childhood is because you remember it from your rose-tinted glasses.  We don't actually have direct access to the way the world is, because we can never take those glasses off.  They give us a distorted reality so that without that filter we really would be unable to experience anything.

J:  Well you know how much I love William James right?  "In James's words, 'the whole man within us' changes.  Similarly, when we 'make up our mind' about beliefs and core values, what we really make is a decision about how we will live and what we will become."  It's imperative that we do grow up.

Me:  Well if we should grow up then how do we know what we should be like as grown ups?

S:  "Growing up is a process of sifting through your parents' choices about everything."   "Rousseau's paradox: we cannot construct a decent society without a critical mass of real grown-ups, yet we can hardly create real grown-ups within a society that doesn't want them."  You'll always have the information and resources that your parents gave you growing up, but it's up to you to decipher what you want to keep and throw out!

J:  Well it all depends on the type of person you want to be.  Do you like how your parents are as grown ups?  Were there things you'd like to change?  "Better to change, even in dangerous and self-destructuve ways, than to languish in inactivity."

I:  Well I think we should do what is morally right.  Regardless of how you feel about your parents, try to leave the emotion out of it, do you think your parents' actions as grown-ups were right or not?  If you agree that they were morally right then you should do the same.  Growing up is a job that doesn't ever stop.  We will always continue to be a "child" growing into what we should be.

Me:  Ok.  I think that helps me on that question.  What then do you all think makes life worth living?

J:  "To endure the horror of existence, the sick soul must be "twice born," or reborn in order to love, or at least bear, the act of living."  I relate a lot to William James.  He was plagued with a sick soul.  Many people think that fame or money makes life worth living.  "It is as if only after a person has been given everything that one has the chance to realize that everything might never be enough to really matter.  It only takes a minor disturbance in the comforts of daily life-just a persistent irritation in an otherwise perfect existence-to bring on this dark realization.  At that point, in the words of the twentieth-century French thinker Albert Camus, 'the stage sets collapse'."

S:  "With the passing of time and the accumulation of experience, things get repeated, and the more the repetition the less the surprise.  As surprise recedes, so does passion.  The facts are the same, but you no longer feel them as acutely.  And isn't that a boon?  Life is dimmer and duller, but it doesn't hurt so much, either.  Those of us who once thrilled to dance and dream until dawn are now content to retire rather earlier to a good bed and pillow.  The edge is missing, but so is the hangover.  You have learned not to count much on the things outside you: friends and fortune can disappear, and you've seen lives upended by floods, famine or war.  The solution, you conclude, can only be found inside you.  You cannot control much else, but with determination and practice you can learn to control your own emotions, at least enough to ensure that what goes on outside affects you less.  You've already accepted the gap between you and the world in principle; what remains is the task of embracing it in practice.  The world is unstable, sometimes treacherous, and immeasurably vast; your soul, by contrast, is sufficiently limited and malleable to be the sort of thing you might transform.  You will sleep better, and hurt less, if you turn your sights inward, for a good soul is in reach when nothing else is."

I:  People have worth and so does life.  The overriding idea of reason and treating people with respect according to how in turn you yourself would want to be treated makes life worth living.  

Me:  Wow.  I have to say I really appreciate all the wisdom.  I actually just heard a message that my pastor preached this last Sunday on the gift of Jesus.  He explained that for Christians we have the gift of salvation everyday which gives us our eternal life with Jesus.  He talked about how we should be living for the kingdom daily, not just as a thing in the distant future.  We should strive to live like Jesus is returning for us every day and live our life accordingly.  That hope that I have to be in heaven one day is what I think makes life worth living.

My dog barks at some passing horses and snaps me back into reality.  Smelling the trees and seeing all of God's creation around me makes this life on Earth worth it.