Professional
Responsibility
Meditations on Philosophy
Philosophy:
No Escape?
"[A]nyone who thinks at all must be a
philosopher--a good one or bad one--because it is impossible to think
without premises, without basic (and in this sense, metaphysical) assumptions
about what is sensible, what is the good life, what is beauty, and what
is pleasure. To hold such assumptions consciously or unconsciously, is
to philosophize." [Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom 12
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951)]
"[T]o laugh at philosophy itself is a
kind of philosophy. . . ." [Alan Watts, The Book:
On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are 130 (New York: Collier Books
ed., 1967)]
"We could conclude from the fact that
some people operate without a philosophically defined framework that they
are quite without a framework at all. And that might be totally untrue
(indeed, I want to claim, always is untrue)." [W.
Luijpen and H. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology
9 (1969)]
"You will sometimes hear people say they
have no metaphysics. Well, they are lying. Their metaphysics are implicit
in what they take for granted about the world. Only they prefer to call
it 'common sense.'" [Edward Stevens, Business Ethics
32 (New York: Paulist Press, 1979)]
"The choice of a philosophy is not rightly
a matter of whimsy or of temperament alone. In fact, most typically, a
philosophy of life is acquired unconsciously through the years in the
process of living, deciding, and acting on decisions. I wake up one day
to discover that I have a philosophy of life that colors the way I approach
the world both ethically and otherwise." [Charles
Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 21 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989)]
"Man cannot live without philosophy.
This is not a figure of speech, but a literal fact. . . . There is a yearning
in the human heart that is nourished only by real philosophy and without
this nourishment man dies as surely as if he were deprived of food or
air. But this part of the human psyche is not known or honored in our
culture. When it does break through to our awareness, it is either ignored
or treated as though it were something else. It is . . . not cared for;
it is crushed. And eventually, it may withdraw altogether, never again
to appear. When this happens, man becomes a thing. No matter what he accomplishes
or experiences, no matter what happiness he knows or what service he performs,
he has in fact lost his real possibility. He is dead.
The fear of this inner death has begun to surface in the modern world. In quiet moments, an individual senses this fear of dying inwardly and sees that all the other fears of his life--his physical and psychological fears--are in no way related to it. At the same time, he senses--along with this fear--a yearning or love unknown to him in his ordinary life. He sees that none of the other loves of his life . . . are related to that yearning for something he cannot name. And he wonders what he can do to heal this profound division in himself between the wish for being and his psycho-social needs. . . . But no sooner does a man move into the activities of his life than the awareness of this division within himself is forgotten.
What will help him remember? For it is absolutely essential that he remember this truth about himself. If he does not, he will be absorbed by the external forces of nature and society. He will be 'lived' by the emotions, opinions, obligations, terrors, promises, programs, and conflicts that comprise the day-to-day life of every human being. He will forget that there are actually two separate lives within him and that these disparate lives need to be related to each other. He will strive for happiness, creativity, love, service to the higher; for vitality, commitment, honor; for understanding, health, integrity; for safety, exhilaration, passionate involvement--but nothing of this will be possible for him in the state of metaphysical forgetfulness. As long as he does not remember the real twofold structure of his being, he and the life around him will form themselves into a tissue of illusion." [Jacob Needleman, The Heart of Philosophy 3-5 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982)]
"Even if man's hunger and thirst and
his sexual strivings are completely satisfied, he is not satisfied. In
contrast to the animal his most compelling problems are not solved then,
they only begin. He strives for power or for love, or for destruction,
he risks his life for religious, for political, for humanistic ideals,
and these strivings are what constitutes and characterizes the peculiarity
of human life." [Erich Fromm, Man For Himself 46
(New York: Rinehart and Company, 1947)]
"Man lives forever on the verge, on the
threshold of 'something more' than he can currently apprehend." [Huston
Smith, "The Reach and the Grasp: Transcendence Today," in Herbert
W. Richardson & Donald R. Cutler (eds.), Transcendence 1-17, at 1
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)]
"There is no choice but to make sense
of life. . . " [Owen Barfield, History, Guilt, and
Habit 15 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981)]
"[L]ife does not come as a prepared kit,
all cut up and ready to process. It comes in a flood of jumbled material
that needs to be picked over and sorted out by endless imaginative work.
Conceptual schemes, and the symbolism that gives them their force, must
be used for this and they will grow up whatever we do. Our choice is simply
between attending to this process and letting our imaginations do it while
our back is turned." [Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information
and Wonder: What Is Knowledge For? 48 (New York: Routledge, 1991]
"These earnest people, who tenaciously
deny their capacity to know anything . . . of moral consequence, may nevertheless
show an inclination to vote, to raise children,, and even to run for office.
They get on, that is, with the business of life, in offering judgments
for the raising of their children and the better ordering of their communities,
even while they insist that there are no grounds on which any of these
judgments can be regarded as true and justified." [Hadley
Arkes, First Things: An Inquiry Into the First Principles of Morals and
Justice ix (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986)]
"Ethics is everybody's concern. Scientific
problems and scientific theories may from time to time intrigue or arrest
all of us, but they are of immediate, practical importance to only a few.
Everyone, on the other hand, is faced with moral problems--problems about
which, after more or less reflection, a decision must be reached. So everybody
talks about values.
This does not mean that the principles of right action or the nature of goodness are perennial topics of conversation--far from it; often the discussion is anything but explicit." [Stephen Toulmin, The Place of Reason in Ethics 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)]
"We men [and women] cannot do without
our daily moments of profound reflection. In them we recapture our self-awareness,
lest the presence of the primal source be lost entirely amid the inevitable
distractions of daily life." [Karl Jaspers, Way to
Wisdom 122 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951)]
"If our lives are not to be diffuse and
meaningless, they must find their place in an order. In our daily affairs
we must be sustained by a comprehensive principle, we must find meaning
in an edifice of work, fulfillment, and sublime moments, and by repetition
we must gain in depth. Then our lives, even in the performance of monotonous
tasks, will be permeated by a mood arising from our conscious participation
in a meaning. Then we shall be sustained by an awareness of the world
and of ourselves, by the history of which we are a part, and, in our own
lives, by memory and loyalty.
An order of this sort may come to the individual from the world in which he was born, from the church which shapes and animates the great steps from birth to death and the little steps of everyday life. He will then spontaneously fit his daily experience into that order. Not so in a crumbling world, which puts less and less faith in tradition, in a world which subsists only as outward order, without symbolism and transcendence, which leaves the soul empty and is not adequate to man, which, when it leaves him free, thrusts him back upon his own resources, in lust and boredom, fear and indifference. Here the individual can rely only on himself. By living philosophically he seeks to build up his own strength what his world no longer gives him." [Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom 120-122 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951)]
