Forgive me, all you philosophers out there, but really . . . what are you for? We are told that studying your varied offerings as to the meaning of life, etc, while rarely providing answers, helps to refine our thought. It toughens it up, gives it rigour, prepares it for the marathon that is a life searching for answers.
I studied it for a bit at university but abandoned ship on realising I might as well be in a supermarket with varied “products” demanding “believe in me!”
It helped when an impoverished colleague stole a book on ethics, read it, and kept it.
Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) – really? Such arrogance. Thought comes before being? On which planet? A computer may think – compute, even – but it is hardly a being. Indeed, and speaking personally, some of the best experiences I’ve had were utterly thought-less, occasionally substance-assisted. Cogito, ergo sum is truly a case of putting Descartes before the horse.
Then there’s mathematics, geometry particularly. I was good at mental arithmetic in school but my brain stalled, never to move again, at geometry, Pythagoras particularly. “Given a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”
I baulked at “given”. By who? And why? For what? To which purpose? No answers. Ever. I wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t budge. My brain wouldn’t move until that fundamental question was answered. I still wait . . .
Then there was theology and Aquinas’s five proofs for the probability of the existence of God. “Proofs” for “probability” – whoever heard the like?
How in heaven’s (sorry) name can you prove a probability, even of God?
Clearly, folks, with a brain as stubborn as the most recalcitrant mule refusing to budge along any route that didn’t appear explicitly reasonable, I was in trouble as a young man. So many questions. So few answers.
It was obvious I was fit for little in life, with such an unreasonable insistence on explanation. It was clear I was suited to just one trade and one only: journalism, the unspeakable in pursuit of the inexplicable, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. (He was talking about fox hunting, rather than truth hunting).
And so, dear reader, you have here a portrait of the journalist as a young man.
Portrait from Old French portret , "to paint, depict"
inaword@irishtimes.com
