Existentialism's Guerrilla Philosophy: You are living your philosophy

On my year off, I ended up visiting Hamilton College, up the street from where I live.

I studied and I explored.

The first one is more surprising than the second.

But what was I doing up there and why? I don't meet Raleigh people at North Carolina State University parties in the same way that I myself was a Clinton resident at Hamilton College.

This outsider experience prepared me for attending the historically black university North Carolina Central University.

While I attended North Carolina Central University, I visited my friend James. My outsider experience prepared me for visiting my friend James when he went to Duke University.

At North Carolina State University, which is known for its preference of North Carolina residents, I have been asked this question over and over again.

All four schools, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Central University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University, have preference-quotas for North Carolina High Schoolers who apply; so does Hamilton College. The Duke family did support James E. Shepard when he founded of North Carolina Central University. The basic reason is: we have to help out those around us.

The black people of NCCU and the rich people of Duke or the North Carolinians of NC State all ask me this out loud so often. The question everyone asked me (and asks me) over and over is: "What are you doing here?"

This sounds like a creation story for a philosopher. But this is absolutely seductive. It spins a lot of emotional pain that I have had. I've had a lot of joy, too.

This is the paramount existential question(with an operational definition for me simply being the question of existence) for obvious reasons.

At its worst it racks my brain. In other words, I have been asked out loud what people go through internally or at least through their own volition.

It would not be a problem if I knew what I was doing here. I mean, besides what I am ostensibly doing here, as in college.

What am I doing here?
I'd give a bullshit answer.
What am I doing here?
Bullshit answer.
What am I doing here?
Bullshit answer.
What am I doing here?
Bullshit answer.
What am I doing here?
Bullshit answer.
What am I doing here?
I don't know. (is this a breakthrough?)



They wanted to know why here instead of any where else in this country.

People are interested in purpose, but in strange ways, and they aren't willing to look too much into it if it gets boring (which the question's answer does and does often).

That's like all of us, except that we have different tolerances and interests. (Note: where is the difference between innate intelligence and personality? re: if a person's personality loves studying or studying enough to become a genius, isn't that an innate intelligence? aren't we sort of double dipping?)

People wanted to know why I was at Hamilton College partying. I never got bothered when I studied at the Library. What are you doing here?

People wanted to know why I was at North Carolina Central University because it is an all black school (I was one of 5 or six white kids; three of which I can name: red haired gang leader white kid, white girl with last name brown which I won't name here, and no comment on the irony, and a kid named Josh who was there studying music).
And I would tell them that I was there for the law school, which was-is true and for my friend James. Was it bullshit when I told them I was there for law school? Sort of?

People wanted to know why I was at Duke University and not doing other stuff, and then they would find out that I was hanging out with James. Was it bullshit when I told them I was hanging out with James? Sort of?
But that answer satisfied for those people asking.

There was one time when a beautiful black woman went into a fit (she was a friend of Makeda's, who's last name I won't write here) and she started shouting at me as in why I was there. I told her that I was just getting lunch, which is true at the time.

People ask me this all the time at NC State University, but it's not as much as when I attended NCCU and visiting Duke University.

This third round of people are wondering why NC State versus upstate New York colleges.

One of the most emotional incidents in the past year have been when I was in Israel and my friend Kenneth asked me over and over. I gave him bullshit about John Edwards, and Law School, and my friend James Ray.

Another one was I was out to eat with some friends and my friend's Dad was Irish. If you don't know, the Irish sense of humor is sarcastic, dry, and mocking. The Irish sense of humor is a gallows humor and also can be sort of brutal-spiteful. But always in jest and for laughs. Example of Irish humor: my friend Jim R. said, "Don't you look like Ben Stiller?" or "Do you know who Jerry Seinfeld is?" speaking to my average, long nose Jewish looks. In other words, making you feel bad helps others laugh at you but also helps you laugh at yourself.

At a dinner this particular Irish-American friend (different from Jim R.), brought up all of the great upstate New York schools (he himself attended the upstate New York Yale Sister Vassar College). He talked about SUNY Geneseo, and SUNY Binghamton, and SUNY Buffalo, and SUNY Potsdam, and all I could say was, "Yeah, those are great schools." What could I say?

Another one was where I talked to my friend Tom and the kid had a shift in his face. Later I thought of:

Sometimes I think freedom is like when you have freedom to be in the act. I define this as kinetic freedom and I think it's beautiful.

The greatest example of kinetic freedom is when you are free falling during a sky dive. There is nothing to do except fall. People talk about this as freeing and feeling alive. That's what I mean.

I thought of all the ways that people feel like they are being forced to attend college, and all of the lectures Tom might have gotten from his parents about money and being close to his parents.

I think of folklore: the Jewish Diaspora (which I originally learned the word from the blacks: they talk about the African Diaspora; it means spreading or disbursement; it has connotations of watering down and losing potency and strength through dilution; there are large bodies of literature dealing with Diaspora studies; what a Diaspora is). Jacob in the Bible is a representative of Jewish Diaspora.

I think of brute specific causality: my parents supported a digression that I made; they were sick of me being close to home, they wanted me to grow up, I had support from James, I was able to get into NCCU because of my minority status and despite my poor grades.

I think of general causality: The North Carolina Triangle is one of the fastest growing parts of the United States and there is a large immigration of North Easterners coming from the Rust Belt; places that look like Flint, Michigan; Midland city, Ohio; and my city Utica, New York. Imagery: these cities have big brick warehouses with broken windows.
This isn't my reasoning, but it allies me with the people around here. My friends Brian C. and Danielle K. and Katie A., were born in California, and my friend Audrey B. is from Ohio.

That is, there is a more general move of this country toward North Carolina because of various reasons. I immediately met up with two family friends when I came down here (they were part of our congregation up north).
Imagine how I felt coming down here and finding out where everyone who left Utica went. This is a more general (I daresay metaphysical) move of a population.

I think of superstition: The Sagittarius is known as a happy traveller; an inside outsider and an outside insider. Sagittarius rules travel, high culture, fringe culture, and foreign interactions. It also rules luck.



I'm thinking to myself: where am I going with this? Answer: I do know and I don't know. Why am I so embarrassed sometimes? Answer: I do know and I don't know.


Why am I here? I do know and I don't know. And I don't know.

What I've been saying here is that I've been giving a short answer and there are times when that short answer is not good enough at the time or in retrospect. The operational definitions don't work for that time or any time. Creation of reality indeed!

Note on the Moderns

The big deal in the 1600-1700's for philosophy was to 1) show stuff could be known and how it could be known and 2) know it.

So for example you could say that Descartes showed things could be known with his system of doubt, which reveals a basic foundation of knowledge.

He then busted out all of what he found in physics, geometry, math, and biology.

For Spinoza, he was also considered a foundationalist, but it had more to do with careful assessment rather than a system of doubt. For example, Spinoza might have said, of course, we all know 2+2 = 4 because of logic. He then proceeded to write his entire system based on this. He dabbled in optics and the physics of optics. Although he only wrote one or two papers on the subject, he did work as a lens grinder (reading-glasses-maker).

John Locke thought he was just working off of Newton, and there's a pretty good quote like this by Locke. Newton can be considered a philosopher, because everyone has to defend their science, and Newton certainly did. Locke hated the idea that Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes thought that you could know something before you experience it. While the rest of us are like, "duh," it was a really crazy thing for all of them to say back then.

Locke's major contributions are known to most high schoolers as Political Science, but he had some all right ones in science, too.

Hobbes died happily thinking that he had squared the circle. (His last words were still philosophical, he said, "A great leap in the dark!" and kicked the bucket).

I just wrote about Leibniz's contributions. As a philosopher of science, Leibniz did something really cool by integrating the sciences.

Berkeley wrote a weird philosophical/scientific treatise on the chemical creation of tar and its uses as a medicine, while Hume was first and foremost a historian.

Writing this about Hume, and I'll explain why I feel this way in a bit, I think it's so cool that it's hard to separate the sciences and philosophies from the person. While mathematics seems about as remote from a person as anything, you can see how these philosopher's (ahem) philosophies shine through. Even without the Hume example I haven't provided, you can sort of see the mathematical rigor of both Spinoza's theory of knowledge and his ventures into optics. You can see how Berkeley wanted to help people by writing a medicine piece on tar between works on how the soul is immortal and God is the only thing that's real. Cool stuff abounds!

Bullshit versus Philosophy

Of the many hats that philosophy (greek: philo (wisdom) sophia (lover)), including integration of sciences, theories of knowledge, regulation of sciences, regulation of art, integration of art and science, ethics, adn so on, philosophy is also concerned with the truth.

In this way, my friend Carter was sitting at the dinner table last semester with me and some friends and he said, "A lot of my friends say that Philosophy is a lot of bullshit."

Well, I think in one way that that statement is correct. Philosophy chases its own tail a lot. By being concerned with the truth, it is as if you have to differentiate between what is true and everything else. This includes falsity (literally not-truth) but also bullshit.

Okay so 'I'm a human' is true. But there are some cool applications of 'I'm not a human' being false. More on that when I have more to say on that.

But bullshit, which Frankfurt describes in his work of pop philosophy On Bullshit, is more like words that have a disregard for truth. In this way, in order for something to be false, it has to at least work off of truth. Bullshit does not do such a thing.

In a similar way, last week, when Cramer was on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart said that he considered Mad Money and the Daily Show to be snake oil, but that the Daily Show at least called itself snake oil.

Running with this a bit, studying philosophy and doing philosophy is kind of like being in a snake oil market. You get to be so analytic of just about anything that in order to find out what is true you have to call everything bullshit to start with in order to get that one bottle of real medicine. Which of it is good and which of it is bad is something I've got to cover later, because I'm not there yet, myself.

It's incredibly wacky. In my last post I described how science had to become less and less dependent upon outside events and more on reason in order to make sense of it. This culminated in this blog's namesake, with Immanuel Kant's theory that rationality has to be applied to science and not the other way around.

It is a really weird thing that by creating a theory of Knowldege meant that Kant had to surrender to the worst skepticism. He laid down all claims about knowledge in order to see what was real. I think this is pretty cool.