Daily Blague

Just when I ought to be succumbing to senior moments, I'm feeling smarter than ever. That may be proof of stupidity, but I think the feeling reflects my growing interest in things. When I was young, I was not interested in very much. I wanted not to be young, and that was about it. Everything was boring. I was not moved to excel. The world that I grew up in had absolutely nothing to offer me except security - and I'm very lucky to have survived the contempt for security that it instilled. Just thinking about Westchester County in the 1950s is enervating.

In all probability, I'm no smarter than I used to be; I've just discovered interests, and connections between those interests. If you are interested, you pay attention, and you're more likely to describe what you're attending to correctly. A very considerable part of my new "smarts" is nothing more than an eagerness to discard the things that don't interest me. I'm somewhat surprised to find that one of these is philosophy.

Notwithstanding my love of wisdom, I have no use for philosophy. For the most part, philosophy seems to be an attempt to systematize the metaphysical, and I'm too much a materialist to care about unseen realities. Beyond that, philosophy looks like just another game that men like to play. Concerned with the meaning of life and the origins of existence, it is a very respectable game - but it is only a game. Shuffling concepts in search of an agreeable arrangement is what philosophers do. As in any game, there are rules that make philosophy difficult to play, but these rules, first sketched by the ancient Greeks, are entirely man-made. For a thousand years, Plato's demand that his students describe the movement of the planets in terms of uniform circular motion impeded the study of astronomy. Plato believed that planets, being "perfect" bodies, must move in a perfect way. It was a silly idea, really, and eventually science and philosophy parted company. I expect that neurobiology will vaporize what's left of "theory."

As for the moral dimension of philosophy, I don't need a system to support my conviction that, despite so much evidence to the contrary, each human life is sacred. I don't need a theory to explain that "sacred" here means that I don't have the right to do harm to anyone, except in my own defense. (My life is sacred, too.) Almost everything in my morality follows from this very simple precept. Either you know it in the bones of your character or you don't, and if you don't, no amount of argument will change that.