P is for Philosophy— Lessons from my Dad

I’m going to live dangerously here for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge and try to form a picture of how, why and where my interest in philosophy came from. Hopefully it won’t look like I’m bluffing my way around a topic I once knew something about...more than a half a century ago. Any "book learning" I had decades ago is running for the hills as if Godzilla just stomped into town. If the Blogging Police want to tisk‑tisk me for bluffing, I can live with it. But stick with me to the end and I may eventually write something profoundly philosophical—and I don’t mean a review of the perfume by that name. (Which I do like, in case anyone wants to know.)

AI defines philosophy this way: “The systematic study of fundamental questions concerning existence, knowledge, ethics, reason, and language. Derived from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ it uses rational argument and critical analysis to understand the world, rather than relying on empirical observation alone. It analyzes concepts like truth, reality, and morality.”

My ideas on philosophy are deeply rooted, and they got their start at my dad’s side. I absorbed them by listening to his Will Rogers‑style way of viewing the world. I don’t know how he picked up his respect for knowledge and education. He dropped out of school in grade school. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader. Yet when I was in college taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic, we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities, and the origins of our values and laws.

Life was his teacher. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods as a kid. He saw the unfairness of Blacks, Italians and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on Dad’s face on Bloody Sunday in 1963 when the nightly news showed fire hoses and attack dogs turned on the peaceful marchers in Selma.

I’ll also never forget the look of sheer happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game Dad loved his entire life. I’m glad he isn’t here to see how far Tiger has fallen, but Dad was the most fair‑minded person I’ve ever known. He’d probably express forgiveness. Why? Because he knew Tiger spent his whole career carrying a heavy load as a role model for an entire generation of dark‑skinned kids. Dad always looked for the story behind the actions of others, and the story usually came with an empathetic twist.

Case in point: decades ago my cousin and brother took my dad to a strip joint, thinking they’d shock him and prove how “grown up” they’d become. After the stripper did her act, my cousin asked what Dad thought about a woman who’d do that. He expected a lot of things, but not Dad saying, “Well, she probably has a baby at home that needs milk, and this is the best job she could get.”

When I downsized nearly five years ago, twenty‑seven books on philosophy and religion made the cut. And I’ve read every single one cover to cover. I can’t say the same about all the other books on my shelves. Some of the titles range from the Bible and The Good Book (aka The Humanist’s Bible) to Aristotle Would Have Liked Oprah, Working on God, The Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy, Seinfeld and Philosophy, Man’s Search for a Soul, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, The Nature of Man, and The Republic of Plato.

Many of my books aren’t hard‑hitting textbooks. But books like Seinfeld and Philosophy (by William Irwin) can teach concepts in a way most of us can understand. One blurb on the back says the book “nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup. Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. As the book puts it, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.”

Kramer, in the same book, is portrayed as being stuck in Søren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the father of the Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The first stage is marked by pleasure‑seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever interests him, and what interests him changes daily. He has no ability to commit to anything.

If I believe in the three spheres — and I can certainly name long periods when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage — then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage began, when I started taking on more responsibility and living a more purposeful life.

But Kierkegaard believed it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage, and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to fully commit to God. Think nuns‑and‑priests‑level commitment. You can be a steady churchgoer and still not be in the third stage if you’re not willing to give up your creature comforts.

Right about now, if anyone is still reading, you’re probably asking what does it matters 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 focuses on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say nearly everyone reading this flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the counterculture years—when we were all searching for meaning and purpose. Some of us still are. I know I am.

Maybe that’s why the recent Walk for Peace fascinated me so much. It reminded me that there are still people willing to give up their earthly comforts to reach a higher plane of faith.

Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe, and other times it’s like riding in an overloaded ferry boat while holding your breath until you reach the other side. Have you ever written or said something, then Googled it to make sure it originated in your own brain and wasn’t something your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence in this paragraph. I wrote it as a reply to a comment on my blog, then deleted it because it seemed too richly philosophically for me to have “invented” it. Google couldn’t find anything remotely similar, so I’m pretty sure I can claim the line as my own.

And with that, my promise to write something philosophical is fulfilled. © 

Note: The painting at the top was by Raphael and its titled The School of Athens. I still have the term paper I wrote in 1961 about the gathering of philosophers portrayed in the piece. It's the only term paper I've kept all these years. I read it very few years just to remind myself that I once knew things.