Philosophers, like most college students, spend a lot of time contemplating busts, but unlike most college students, the busts they contemplate are marble, and resemble old men.
A philosopher is someone whose brain stays in all-time 4-wheel drive. They make a lot of noise on the highway, but they can pull you out if you’re stuck in the mud.
-You’re probably a philosopher if you can’t stop thinking about why you think stuff. Your core assumptions about the world and how it works are constantly under scrutiny, none more withering than your own, and you live with the deep-seated arrogance of only believing things that really make sense and also the constant paranoia that comes from your intimate knowledge of how fragile anyone’s grasp on reality really is. You’ve seen firsthand a strong foundation crumble, and you’ve seen a supple twig break- so you’re either humble before the abyss of ignorance over which every human being is suspended and the vast gulf between us and truth, or you’re whistling in the graveyard, tooting your own horn to stave off the silence- or worse, the music- of a mysterious universe. It’s probably a little of both.
J.D. Salinger wrote that “The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.” He might have been talking about philosophers, as well.
Philosophy is like a hydroelectric dam. Ideas flow in, and are transformed by complex and powerful machinery into usable energy. When the river runs dry, the generators fall silent. When it overflows, they do the best they can to contain and process the flow, worrying all the while that the dam will break.
Philosophers are like 911 operators or ER nurses coming off a long and difficult shift. After having been confronted face to face with the fragility, agony and ecstasy of the human experience, they stumble into a diner to eat a quick meal before they go home to crash, and all around them are people just going about their lives, oblivious to the life-and-death struggles going on all around them. They want to grab the people by the shoulders and shake them. “Don’t you see? Aren’t you afraid that there might not be any meaning to our lives? Don’t you realize that we might not be free at all? Haven’t you been thinking?”
Sharing ideas is a way to exercise courage. The risk you take is that your ideas will be rejected, either because they don’t make sense, challenge people’s assumptions and make them uncomfortable, or both.
