Philosophy 001

“Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe and other times it’s like riding on an overloaded ferry boat while holding our breath until we safely reach the other side of the river.” Have you ever written or said something then decided to google the phrase to make sure it originated in your own brain and isn’t something someone else wrote that your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence up above. I wrote it as reply to a comment on my blog then deleted it because I seemed too rich philosophically for me to have 'invented' it. Then that same evening one of my fellow residents called me ‘The Philosopher’ so I must have at least one person fooled. She’s the Art Professor, the one I fan-girl stalked until I finally got to meet her. I’m still a fan. Whenever she’s at a table the quality of the conversations are more playful yet deeper and better quality than, say, a conversation with my upstairs neighbor who never fails to report on a conversation she just had with a cousin down in Florida. Two bored old ladies, the last in their family to be alive and each morning they feel compelled to make sure the other made it through the night. 

Google came up with a quote they claimed was as close to mine as they could find and since it isn’t remotely similar to my ‘hairball’ I’m pretty sure I can claim that first sentence in this post as my own. This is what Google found: 

“Even though you and I are in different boats, you in your boat and we our canoe, we share the same river of life. What befalls me befalls you. And downstream our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.” Oren Lyons

My quote and this one do have a few similarities, though. Both feature a boat, a canoe and the river of life but Mr. Lyons' words are a regurgitation of William Shakespeare’s “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children” from The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare, according to a lot of websites, is the most quoted writer in the English language. While Irish Times (whoever they are) claims the honor of being the most quoted belongs to Oscar Wilde with George Bernard Shaw coming in second. I just read through a bunch of Wilde and Shaw quotes but they seem obscure to me except for: “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing” which I'm pretty has been reproduced on coffee cups and book marks. Mr. Shaw makes it sound like we stop playing on purpose---as if we had a real choice. Life happens to us all and it’s really hard to play when we’re dealing with serious issues. In other words we can be playfully floating down a river in a canoe when we don’t have a care in the world but when we're on an overloaded ferry boat aka carrying a basket full of problems we’d darn well better pay attention because our very lives might depend on it.

Have you figure it out yet, that this is a post about nothing? I have a three foot shelf in my bookcase totally filled with philosophy books, some I’ve even read from cover to over, many others I just pick up and read a page or two at random. One book is titled Seinfeld and Philosophy by a professor of philosophy named William Irwin and I’ll bet his classes are popular. One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book “…nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup, think about it; Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. To quote a line from inside the book, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.” 

 

Kramer from the Seinfeld TV sitcom is portrayed in the book as being stuck in Soren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Soren (1813 to 1855) was the father of The Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages. The first stage is marked by pleasure seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever he finds interesting and what he finds interesting is always changing. He has no ability to commit to anything. If I believe in the three spheres of existence---and I certainly can name periods in my life when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage---then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage started, when I began taking on more responsibility, living a more purposeful life, the way most of us do as we age. 

 

But Kierkegaard believed that it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage of existence and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to actually commit to God. Think nuns and priests kind of commitment. You can be a steady church goer but still not be in the third stage of existence if you're not willing to give up your creature comforts for God.

 

Right about now, if anyone is still reading this, you’re asking yourself, what does it matter what some old Danish dude thought? To answer that I’ll share a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy: "Kierkegaard’s work gave rise to the major trend in twentieth century philosophy known as 'existentialism’ a philosophy that forces on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say that nearly everyone reading this has at least flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late '60, early '70s---marked by the counterculture---that had us all searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. And some of us are still searching...  ©