The Great Philosophy Give-Away For Those Who Can Take
It
You can
imagine my surprise as I strolled through Greenwich Market some weeks back and
found a small group of students were passionate enough about philosophy to set
up a stall as a way of promoting philosophy, not as an abstract discipline, but
as something that really matters to everybody, a questioning attitude to life,
death, politics, desire, time, to everything. It has been said that a life
unexamined is not worth living, it might be truer to say that it is a life
unlived, so philosophy is, among other things, a tool for living as well as,
literally, a love of wisdom.
It might be that the only wisdom available to us is
the questioning of apparent certainties or the morass of uncertainty that
besets us all in our daily lives. (As I write it is the party conference season
in which any discernible fact becomes lost on multiple spins and the only
things that prevail often seem to be either prejudice or intellectual
double-dealing of an incredibly facile and stupid nature.)
So, bringing philosophy back to where it began, the
market place, seems to me to be wonderfully commendable. To place your
knowledge and intelligence at the service of the public, to question our lives,
our leaders, the ideologies of our time, that is a real challenge, it can also
be fun. The chance to challenge your own thinking by talking over some issue
with intelligent people, to be provoked and to feel those “leetle grey cells”
actually connecting up a bit and doing a bit of overtime, that is no mean thing
for a lunch break.
The trick really is not merely to defend your own
opinion, whatever that is, but maybe to see what other position you might take,
challenge your own thinking from the outside, maybe transform a mere opinion
into a real argument about something that matters. Nobody can do that for you,
but maybe the good people at the Philosophy Takeaway can help you to do it and
in doing so prove twice over that philosophy is relevant to our lives. It is
also interesting and enjoyable, isn’t that extraordinary? This is a takeaway
with more mental vitamins and the argument is free, a real bargain.
By Stuart Inman
