What helps philosophical thinking

Last semester, through an educational watch within my cc0 “Understanding Life”, I found myself sitting in a chair near the window on the east side of the classroom. I had undergone surgery on my spine several months ago, and landing or standing was extremely difficult. I needed to rest.

I told the students at first, fixing the pillow under my head “which argued first, that living an authentic way is a goal in itself. For some, authenticity reaches morality as the ultimate ideal.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “here began to gesture energetically”. The only right, is what's behind my constitution, the only mistake is against it!” I accidentally supported my back on the wall. Nothing is more sacred than the integrity of your mind!” I saw my students and I shook. It had happened to me, and maybe not to them, that I was “being” in absurd. I had this idea, and then, because over-thinking is my profession, I analyzed it. But why absurd?

On the one hand, absurdity stems from a visible gap between expectations and reality, claim and result, or means and goals. Sometimes incompatibility is fun. Imagine an exhibition at the end of the year in an artist's apartment, which includes only a small improvised picture, which describes the artist as sleeping.

At other times, incompatibility is terrible, as if a fan of the fossil fuel industry were appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency. In my case, non-compliance was between command and authority that was expected to exhibit a professor, and the fact that I was lying below the level of banks, under an bulging pillow.

My horizontal laws would not be absurd at all, for example, economist or historian. There's something especially absurd about philosophers, whether they're lying or not. The explanation for this can be found in the best - known philosophical writing of absurdity, by Thomas Nagel in 1971.

Nagel argued that when we feel that something or everything in life is absurd, we are experiencing the confrontation of the two prospects from which we see the world. One is that of the busy person, who sees life from within, with his heart on his chest. The other is that of the breakaway spectator who monitors human activity in a cold manner, as if from a distance of another planet.

Nagel notes that this is our nature, and it fluctuates between these views. And our sense of absurdity comes between these two prospects. If we kept our inner perspective forever, we'd never experience the shock of doubt if what we're doing, it's worth the last one, or something.

If we could otherwise see all human affairs from the standpoint of the universe forever, we would be as if we were full - timers for whom nothing human matter matters. Although Nagel says that we are all given both prospects, some people are more clearly identified with one or the other.

And some of these people are grouped into professions, where a perspective is not proportional. academic philosophy is such a profession. When people say:” Let's be philosophical about such situations”, they actually want to say:” Let's take it easy, take a step back, cut off some of the reality”

In public imagination, philosophy is distanced from the common concerns and feverish interactions that dominate the rest of mankind. He or she chooses the external perspective on many common things. When Soren Kierkegard fell to the ground during a party, and people tried to help him get up, he reportedly said:” Oh, let him clean the cleaning lady in the morning!”

If this image is correct, and if Nagel's definition is correct, philosophers, anchored forever to just one of Nagel's prospects, will be rescued from the absurdity of the human situation. However, we philosophers are among the most absurd people I have ever met. And reason smells like paradox.

Abstract and secession may be a fad of philosophy, but philosophers often stick firmly to such things as passion, abstract passion in more concrete ways. They spend years working obsessibly, over essays on strange titles and then argue publicly about them at conferences.

To me, this is part of the beauty of philosophy. Yeah, there's something especially absurd but also tempting, so I was like abstract and feverish while I was sitting under my pillow. But what does this have to do with nonsense? Many of us associate the concept not merely with contradiction, nor with the most complex perspective of Nagel, but with futility.

A beautiful illustration of this is the video of a Japanese game called “The slippery steps” that became viral last year. The show requires its players to climb up their bare legs at the top of an ice - dressed ladder. The video features six 6 people who desperately try to do this, and they repeatedly slide down the stairs again, often taking along the other five. “As life itself”- someone wrote in comments.

What approach should we take in this case? One possibility is to shake our noble fists into the cosmos, curse its quiet cold and slippery stairs. This attitude appeals to a certain college boy. But some of us women, with limited abilities, ethnic and gender minorities, and so on, realized much earlier that we were not exactly the center of the universe.

So when our teenage attention is directed toward the disappointments of life, we are more inclined to pay attention and return. Nagel recommends something similar to access. He writes:” If anyone under the species is eternal, there is no reason to believe that there is something important, then it doesn't matter, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony, instead of heroism or despair”.

But irony can be less appealing in 2018 than in 1971. There's something in the view of everything you value under an ongoing attack that increases your sense of importance. My favorite is this: the authenticity of our situation, it's disturbing, only if it means that nothing matters, and that all human goals are basically meaningless.

But none of the definitions of absurdity discussed above have this implications. If you love what you are doing, and if what you want has the true value of man (approximately, the definition of understanding of moral philosopher Susan Wolf), your life can have depth and purpose, even if it involves inconsistencies and failures, even if the universe does not care for him or for you.

Speaking seriously about philosophy with teenagers, as your back collapses, their hearts break, their parents fight, and the country splits up you can call this absurd. But you can also see from the chair near your window, and after you fall from there and an awkward situation, call it beautiful. Then get back to work. / “aeon. c” World.al