Socrates on his death bed.
Real philosophy, the way I understand it, is more than a study and research area, it is a very creative and individualistic field. It is the right of the individual, to ponder about life, again and again, and not to be swallowed by the mechanization of living for the sake of living.
Real philosophy must carry in itself the power of living, to touch, to shake, to come from the guts to the guts, and not just from head to head.
For in the end philosophy talks about our life: death, time, the meaning of life and so on.
Philosophy must come not only from the guts but also from the heart, therefore it has to carry in her much of poetry, in order for it to fertilize the intellectual dryness.
Today in order to understand modern philosophers such as: Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others – a person needs an outstanding durability. The text is intellectual, hard, dry, complicated, full of difficult words and concepts, that more than they are there to bring the reader closer to its content, they are there to actually remove whoever does not belong to the academic circles and click.
The problem is not with those who are not interested in philosophy, but with the few that did not give up the wish to understand what is going on, and what does it mean: to exist, (and all this without giving up the freedom of thought for the advantage of a click, be it academic or religious).
Philosophy disconnected itself from life and turned to be the territory intellectual elite group of scholars. It was uprooted from the individual who is trying to unveil the truth under the misleading cover of social reality.
From the day the philosophy became a science it stopped doing what poetry in particular and art in general are trying all the time to do; to touch the heart of being, to redeem and to free internal truth from the prison of social, political and economic – norms. –
Philosophy is dealing today in doing order and putting philosophies under certain categories, instead of focusing in the essence, which is the riddle and puzzle of human existence.
Those who are closer to dealing with the core are: Heraclitus, Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but far above them was Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger was a kind of a rebel; he was going against the philosophy that forgot the idea of being. But with it he was using conservative philosophical methods to present his philosophy.
Philosophy is supposed to deal with truth, but the problem is not in truth but in the ‘finger’ pointing to it, philosophy is a finger, pointing to truth. But the problem is that the finger became the thing itself and not direction to where truth is.
Unable to go in the direction to truth – they turn finger to be the truth itself.
In the Academia they concentrate on the finger; analyzing it, research it, but the finger has no meaning as a finger and not as a pointer.
So is philosophy, it is not important if it is dealing in analysis and categorizing of the various streams and methods of thinking. It is relevant only if it connects us with a knowing about existence.
Philosophy moved away from the core of itself, and the core of philosophy is pondering about the meaning of existence. And when something has moved away from its core, he gets a hold in concepts, theories and models.
Concepts are the contour lines of things, but if concepts become the center than what should be inside them –gets lost.
Philosophy got fat, adding more covers and dresses around the philosophical nucleus, added more models that eventually hides the core.
And if this is not enough, there is another deterioration in the field in which she is; it is considered an unpopular thing to declare direct and open philosophical statements about life. To write invented stories is ok, but writing essays about life and existence – it is not common.
Most fiction writers are hiding in their stories their positions towards life, and leave it for the critique or the reader to try and interpret it. The writers themselves when interviewed they try and evade a direct expression of how they perceive and address life. They say that they are writers and they leave the meaning or message of what they write – to the reader.
And there are even writers that say that there is no message, they just wanted to tell a story, But a world view, a saying about life and existence = God forbid…
Even those who write philosophy books are hardly writing their own philosophy, but are writing about other philosophers.
Why? Why is it so unpopular?
May be because:
A. every well-defined and clear position about life will always magnetize to it objections, and thus it is safer and more careful not to expose the exact position.
B. It is difficult to consolidate clear philosophical position in such a confused world.
C. Real philosophy presents questions and thus is enlarging the embarrassment and confusion.
D. when you deal with truth, especially about existence itself – it is frightening and maybe painful.
Real philosophy never dealt with personal happiness, but is confiscating the personal happiness for the sake of a greater and uncompromising truth.
In any case, there are in our world only few philosophies and philosophers.
What was once, one area that had in it: individual creativity, intellectual knowledge and spirituality – got divided and the divisions joined three camps: the creativity joined to the arts, the ingredient of the intellect joined science, and the spiritual ingredient joined religion and mystic movements.
The art refuses to talk about intellectual understanding, the researchers in the Academia don’t create something of their own, and the spiritual mystics are in closed in groups. And between the three – the philosophical truth fell in through.
Gabriel