Philosophy: Ordinary People

There was a show a while back called “Wings” where one character, a not-so-bright mechanic, Loel, was reminiscing about his boyhood difficulties, and one occasion when he and his father went downtown and tearfully watched ordinary people.

His boss remarked, “oh, that movie always made me cry too.”

Loel, blank-faced, replied, “what movie?”

Tonight, Ali gave a talk to the Philosophy Society on the Supremacy of Philosophy as a discipline, somewhat echoing my thoughts in Why Philosophy? but focusing on the curiosity that drives a person beyond his or her circumstances. This curiosity takes one to question his or her very foundations of knowledge: beyond science, beyond religion… at first to epistemology. This person becomes an epistemologist.

This person now can turn back and show the scientist, the theologian, and everyone else their guiding assumptions, their unquestioned and unknown foundations, their flawed understandings.

ME:

The problem is that the philosopher, once ascending to such knowledge, runs the risk of self-alienation, of cutting him/herself off from the way of the world, setting him/herself up in opposition to it. Then the world becomes not a field of learning, of teaching, and of love, but a darkness into which the philosopher may plunge for ‘lower pleasures’ but no real contact. This philosopher thus is no better than the others, for he develops his own unfounded assumptions: separateness, immortality, and eternal joy in the world of knowing to which he may go if only the world would not hinder him. Opposed to the world, the world opposes him. He develops self-righteousness, “I SEE you’re flaws, oh world. You see nothing.”

But the philosopher may also reenter the world, gently; in the words of one of my teachers, ‘he becomes fully human, fully normal.’ He sees the divinity/enlightened nature of others as reflections of his own. He does not see and recoil from the flaws of the world. He acts fluidly within the world. The world’s problems are his problems and rather than point fingers he moves to fix what he can fix. For him we are all ‘ordinary people’, regardless of learning, talent, wealth, gender, etc.