It's Opening Day of the Fall 2017 semester at our school. I'll meet two sections of CoPhilosophy this afternoon, commencing once again to try and explain what philosophy is for: it's for getting better at asking questions and entertaining alternative possible answers, for coexisting with those who answer differently, for learning to love thinking for ourselves, for learning how to be happy, for learning how to live and die.... among other things.
Alain de Botton's School of Life has its critics, but it sure performs a valuable service when it comes to opening a philosophical conversation. That's what our classes are, extended conversations with one another but also with philosophers long past and, we may hope, into a far future.
Our quest is for clarity, in William James's sense when he defined philosophy as an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly, and for sweep:
"...explanation of the universe at large, not description of its details, is what philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that a view of anything is termed philosophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with other views... any very sweeping view of the world is a philosphy in this sense." Some Problems of Philosophy
We're also in search of mutual understanding and respect, in Spinoza's sense when he said "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
And we're also after kindness, in Kurt Vonnegut's sense when he welcomed babies to planet Earth and informed them of its one indispensable rule:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
Ultimately of course, in philosophy we're searching for wisdom. We like it, we love it, we need a lot more of it, philo-sophia...
It’s one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty, it doesn’t sound like something one could ever consciously strive to be – unlike say, being cultured, or kind. Others could perhaps compliment you on being it, but it wouldn’t be something you could yourself ever announce you had become... SoL
And so we begin. Put on your philosophy goggles, everyone. You don't want to look directly at the Form of the Good (aka the sun) without 'em. No one's exempt from the laws of nature.
Opening Day this year is also Freedom Day.
On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, "We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers." They worked diligently for nearly two years, convincing members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put aside their differences and participate...There was no violence. There was not one single arrest. Marchers linked hands, they sang, and they chanted all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th speaker of the day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., began what would become one of the greatest speeches in history with, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." WA
And it's the poet Goethe's birthday (1749). He said "A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days." Not so. I can stand ordinary days just fine, so long as the occasional exception is peppered in from time to time. Days like today.
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