Saturday, June 3, 2006

Journal Entry: The philosophical jigsaw puzzle

I think that the source of my fascination in philosophy is not because I seek "the truth" as it were, but because I enjoy developing, communicating, and understanding worldviews. [...] These seem to be intertwined in some form with virtually everything, but the medium of its deliberation is naturally philosophy.

A worldview typically is a context for action and experience. The subject tries to make sense of the "why" for surrounding undergoings and delve for a purpose for the subject's self, and that consequent self's actions. A worldview might be looked upon as an assessment of one's experience, an intellectual foray into ontology, teleology, ethics, and everything else.. but it cannot be regarded as something passive. One cannot distance their actions from their worldview, the two are a result and a cause. The interest, I think, that I find in the examination of worldviews is that it is extremely topical and meanwhile looming and ever-important. The fear that I have of my interest in them is that I will reach a conclusion: I will erect thick walls to constrict my epistemology and as I become more and more familiar of the space between those walls, I will at last reach a definitive conclusion and say, "that's all there is to that." At the point that I come to this conclusion, I feel as though my soul* will be at an impasse as well, and life will lose its splendor. Once my process of becoming has been reconciled, I fear that I will succumb to boredom, monotony, and necessity.
[* Poetically considered; think "heart" with a intellectual connotation.]


The center of my fascination, again, is not the destination, but the seemingly infinite possibility of the process of coming to understand. Even if there is one truthful contextualization to be discovered (objectively considered.. which doesn't seem plausible to me), I don't think that I would care for it. I would either dismiss it as being too simple or unpleasing, and then seek to develop it further, much like a crazy person trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle that has already been solved--dismantling and reconfiguring it again and again to be certain that the picture depicted was correct, and then, dissatisfied, reconstructing that puzzle in ways that seem more interesting than what is produced from its intended configuration. [...]



6/22 update:

In retrospect this sounds almost comical. I've been reading Wittgenstein lately and I think that my interest in philosophy proper is nearly exhausted. I'm still deeply interested in ethics and aesthetics, but those are matters of judgment, not "truth".

I don't think I have any further interest in metaphysics or epistemology.. much less a drive to construct some bizarre "jigsaw puzzle" because I am unwilling to accept one worldview. At present I've come to conclude that, with maybe the exception of ethics, most philosophical inquiries are paltry and unfruitful in comparison to empirical studies (e.g. natural sciences, sociology, economics, psychology). Whether or not I will act upon this conclusion in the near future is something that I cannot say.



1/1/08 update:

Re-reading this, I've definitely come a long way. When I wrote this I was very much into Kierkegaard and learning toward an uncertain religious orientation. The issue for me now is not that becoming or destinations are irrelevant, it's simply that philosophy plays no part in this. Likewise, there's no harm in establishing a sound worldview, provided that it does not claim to know that which it does not or cannot know. I think I've come to reach something of this since I wrote this.

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