Once upon a time, back at the University when-and-where I was a Philosophy major, life was at once more sophisticated and more simple. Simple because everything in life reduced to manageable ideas, based on where in the cycle from ardent to disaffected I happened to be at the time. ‘Sophisticated’ literally because of the sophistry inherent in the process.
Of course the logical progression (heh, concept pun, I’m actually chortling at that one, what a nerd) goes from epistemology to rationalism to zen.
Epistemology first, what is knowledge? That’s easily written off as what can be known, what is fundamental to us as thinking beings. From there we go to rationalism, reason, logic. Then the inevitable backlash— transcendence and dismissal of reason in favor of … what? Intuition, the inescapable and ineffable moment. Being alive, being happy, just Being.
Of course, just Being makes the idea of Meaning, meaningless. Hell, that’s arguably the whole purpose of zen. And we can’t have that, no we can’t.
Nuh huh, no way.
Why not? Because we care. Because stuff matters. Because when bad things happen (California is burning as I write this, and I worry for my loved ones in the path of destruction, enough to break the ‘no topicality’ rule I set myself when I started this blog) we react. And we don’t react in an ineffably intuitive way. We plotz. Plotzing is neither rational nor zen.
To paraphrase my favorite rationalist David Hume, from “A Treatise of Human Nature”, no matter how intellectually evolved we are, we still get bitch-slapped by Life. To which I can only add, the trick is to get back up and be happy again as soon as you can.
2 comments:
I womder--was Nero happy? xxx
Hume is my homey, luv him. and YOU were the one who first introduced us.
and what did u say to Max Maven? do tell us, it musta beena a good one. not really a surprise, tho, u'r ever so much wittier (tho not Whittier) than u think.
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