A Point of View 1

A Point of View 1

A point of view

By Andy Cox 

 

 

A philosophy

 

Happiness is the vivid bloom

of lives lived in a rich loam.

Our humanity a humus for those to come,

but we too are the beneficiaries of

others amongst us or gone.

So, death is undone through life’s legacy,

ceaselessly so in our common soil,

our commonweal in which the passing of one

seemingly brings forth others.

– No reincarnation :

Only others informing us as we inform others –

from which we can pick precious purpose.

Dark weeds there may be amongst us

that would forswear our mutuality and leech,

as there are some who would set themselves apart

in manicured beds corrupted with sterile soil.

Neither acknowledges the give and take.

Yet it is our bonds that set us free –

knowing what binds us unbinds us.

And when one day, this becomes religion,

then may we find a capacity to rejoice

every time a bud opens

                                                                                        2002

                                                              

 

 It’s like this: For a good many years, my head has been a pot for a sort of intellectual stew, the ingredients of which have managed to retain their separate identities, even if they’ve become a little soggy over time. A splash of good wine has surely enhanced the flavour: (In vino veritas, no doubt). And many a good argument has provided the spice, adding nuance to the creation. I say creation, but, in fact, none of these ingredients is novel: One or two of these old roots have been around since antiquity. What interests me, however, is their interrelationship, the alluring possibility that they may, so to speak, enhance each other. Their integration into something bigger, a worldview if you like, is the thesis of this polemical exercise. Five of the larger entities in this stew, which I intend to slice apart, are:

Analogy as a spurious source of knowledge. The non-survivalist notion that we have no identity or existence after death. Atheism The idea and ideal of a moneyless, stateless, propertyless world in which each has free  access to the products of humanity, and contributes according to his or her  ability and inclination.

These, I would contend, contribute to a fifth ingredient, namely:

An ethic which enjoins one to better the lives of others.

But before I begin to ladle this out, there is something I feel which needs to be said: Man, I believe, is doomed to be a philosopher. No one bar those devoid of abstract thought can escape this fate. Beneath all the internalised trivia, beneath the layers of received knowledge that crowds one‘s mind, there lies a philosophical construction addressing the very nub of one’s existence, whether this is acknowledged or not, whether this construction is fashioned on the hard anvil of critical thought or represents merely a concatenation of conventional responses to the big questions of life. In other words, everyone has a worldview. In presenting my own, I am merely laying bare a philosophical construction that seems to make sense to me. To be honest, I am not unquestionably certain about it: It tilts in places and contains many a threadbare rivet. But it coheres sufficiently to satisfy my own need to understand the world around me.

 So here’s a taste of that intellectual stew: I have no idea at all why we are here on this earth, or, indeed why earth should be here in the first place. Any suggestion that our existence and that of the universe serve some purpose begs more than a few questions. What I think draws people into this sort of thinking is a deep-seated, almost reflexive, propensity for analogical thinking in which one phenomenon is explained by comparing it and drawing parallels with another. It seems to me that in our ordinary lives – when not engaged in philosophical discourse – we are sometimes implicitly informed by all manner of delusions, as well as truths, which we do not pause to consider, and which are extracted from the mud of our mundane existence, primarily, through the mechanism of analogy. Our ordinary world is the base from which we peregrinate on philosophical excursions. One might argue that this base itself occupies philosophical terrain. But the philosophical grounding of our everyday existence is necessarily implicit and ‘out of mind’: When we engage with the ordinary, we are rarely impelled towards philosophical reflection. Philosophy, in any case, competes with many other disciplines – psychology, biology, and economics, amongst others – in respect of our proclivity for abstraction. I am not suggesting that

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