Sometimes I wish that I had more time to study philosophy . . . and that there were more people around to talk about it with! Actually, I’ve met a handful of people who know things about the great thinkers and the great ideas. Unfortunately, they’re kind of hard to get thru to. Maybe that’s the way I am too. Maybe there’s just something about philosophy that makes it hard to talk with other philosophers about. Well, such is life.

Or maybe I just don’t understand it all that well. I’ve been going thru my “Great Minds of the Western Tradition” CD series again, and I’ve found that I make a bit more sense out of it this round. But still, a lot goes over my head. Some of these thinkers really hit home for me, and some of them don’t. I felt good about Plotnius, Erasmus, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, Hume, Montessquieu, J.S. Mills, Kierkegaard, James, Freud, Dewey and the Frankfurt School. And Nietzsche wasn’t as bizarre as his reputation would have it. But Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein just didn’t cut it with me. And the modern guys (and they are all guys – not one female made the list of great thinkers here) like Quine, Rawls, Rorty and Nozick left me cold too. Forget about Derida and Levi-Strauss; DOA for me. No one seemed to latch on to anything exciting since the turn of the 20th Century; but then again, it was a difficult Century. And then again, maybe it’s just me and my lazy mind at [non] work.

One thing that did irk me about so many of the pre-20th Century philosophers was their search for an “anchor”, an unmovable reference point for knowing, being and truth. E.g., Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. No one ever did much better. Plato speculated that there are “forms” behind it all; Hegel talked about “world spirit”; Schopenhauer said it is all grounded in “will”; and Husserl postulated something about a “transcendental ego”. And of course the ancient Jews and Christians said that it all comes down to God. Some folk said that science and empiricism is the best answer. Well, as it turned out, rational thinking left much to be desired (although irrational thinking leaves even more).

But one area of science does help answer a lot of philosophical questions, and that is the process of Darwinian evolution. In more than one lecture about a 16th or 17th century thinker, I wanted to shout back that all of this guy’s speculation could have been cut short and a lot of ink and breath could have been saved if they just knew how evolution worked back then. The first “great thinker” that seemed to get it was Dewey with his “empirical naturalism”.

But then again. I enjoy metaphysical speculation too, and I haven’t given up on the idea of God yet. So it may seem a bit contradictory for a person like me to be espousing the theory of evolution as the end-all for human wisdom. Well, perhaps I’m as much of a “piece of work” as some of the philosophers. Or maybe I’m just ready to concede that there is a natural realm, about which evolutionary processes can tell us much; and there is, at least in our minds, also a metaphysical realm, where everything is up for grabs. And the bridges between the two realms are very shaky.

But as humans, we are natural bridge builders, just as beavers are natural dam builders. So we go on speculating about how our realm of day-to-day objects, forces and complex side-effects (like American politics) relates to our imagined worlds of “forms” or “God and heaven” or “great laws”. Or perhaps “no other side at all”, as the atheists and modern scientists would have it. Well, no-bridge is still a metaphysical bridge of sorts; perhaps because evolution set our minds up to believe in some kind of metaphysics. It’s just part of our nature. The danger behind all this is that people too often decide that their bridge is better than all others. Then, even worse, they start trying to undermine or blow up the other bridges. That’s known, in its lighter manifestations, as closed-mindedness. When taken too far, it becomes holy war.

The best philosophy I can think of right now would be the attitude that your “bridge to the other side of reality” is my bridge too, and my bridge is your bridge. All bridges are to be respected (so long as they don’t lead to obviously disrespectful things like ritual killings or such). All religious and metaphysical views are to be considered. No one’s particular vision can contain the whole truth, but perhaps in the sum of all such visions lies a greater truth. That’s the best I can do for now.