What is philosophy? Literally translated it is the love of knowledge. But what then is love?
Does it mean that we collect ideas and arrange them lovingly on shelves in all of their variety? A carefully tended garden of ideas?
Or is it something more forceful? Is there a drive to go deeper within the perceivable system of ideas, to penetrate the inner structure of truth, a muscular creative act, in a drive to comprehend the nature of life itself?
Is philosophy, like the love of life itself, vital and necessary? Or is it only a pastime?
Natural philosophy was the precursor to science itself and as such represented something much larger, something deeper and richer than the fractionated logical mechanics we know as science today.
As such we have to remember that for much of our history it referred to a sense of the sacred, of deity, of God‘s creation. Natural philosophy is the grand historical effort to understand ultimate truth. Technology is an application of that deeper drive. A love of technology is not a love of truth.
In the modern world, possessing an almost infinite encyclopedia of ideas in the palms our hands, it is easy to become distracted by the garden of philosophy. Philosophy without that impulse to love quickly becomes sophistry, still a creative act but lacking an essential vitality.
It is also easy in the modern world and has perhaps always been so, to disconnect philosophy and the search for truth from the deeper drives of life. While a creative impulse informs both kinds of philosophy, shallow and deep, the imperative of the Caretaker of life is what drives the gardener to dig deep and work hard. Life must be actively tended and nurtured.
This is because the love of truth is not an abstract thing. It is a recognition of life and life is fragile. Suffering and the pain of contradiction drives the gardener of truth and animates the history of philosophy.
As philosophers we are not merely the collectors of ideas or even the historians of truth. We are healers desperately searching to define the principle of life in a situation where it seems that all our efforts, despite our best intentions, increasingly endanger that fragile flame.
There is desperation in philosophy. We tend not only the garden of truth but the garden of life.
This is something that we begin to perceive as we grow as philosophers. It is impossible to separate our intellectual activity from the reality we see around us. We become philosophers when we understand that the world around us and the world within us are not separate anymore. Our safety and our vitality is dependent upon the health of the garden that we tend. Our garden of truth.
Philosophy then becomes an act of self defense. We understand that the garden is threatened when we lapse as caretakers. It is not threatened by life and by nature, which contain within themselves innate healing and homeostatic urges, but by the lapse itself. The lapse of the caretaker.
Life is threatened by our own dissociation from it. This is why the creative impulse can sometimes feel a little bit violent and why philosophy must regain its sense of the sacred. A sacred duty.
Philosophy, the love of knowledge, is the greatest call to the healer because this is what it means to love in the world today. It has surely always been this way. But just as surely we have never felt the need more acutely than now.
The call to the healer is what takes us deep into the truth, beyond the initial epiphanies of the creative impulse, and into the role of the caretaker of planetary wisdom.
As Musclemonk it is my mission to try to bring the body we have into our awareness as the microcosm of the challenge we face globally. But not only the challenge. It is also the source of life and love and hope that we possess tangibly.
The philosophical study of anatomy takes the form of embodiment and self knowledge. When we look within and see our own body clearly this is when science returns to its ancient home in natural philosophy.
There is a neurophysiological system of self knowledge aptly named proprioception. This is a muscular system, the deepest field of muscular self awareness. It is our postural core and its role is our essential physical homeostasis. There is an ancient fascination with the muscle sense as the foundation of life itself. Today, in the history of philosophy, we possess this finally as a form of carnal knowledge.
This is where we find within ourselves the emergence of the planetary drive to homeostasis and integration and this is where we merge into that universal principle of life and love. It does not happen in our intellects. The intellect is far too restricted in scope neurologically. The intellect is the gatekeeper or the guide and we do not need it any longer once we return home to the active, muscular truth we possess deepest within.
These words are all richly suggestive and metaphorical. But when the metaphor becomes muscular we experience the end of our dissociation from life and our separation from truth. Metaphor becomes meaning when we rely not only on the intellect but include the primal field of the muscle sense. Planetary wisdom is not only human. It is more than human. We do not possess it like another technology. It necessarily includes our animal intelligence and with it our integration into the fabric of life.
Feature Image by Tiểu Bảo Trương from Pixabay.