In Andreas Matthias’s wonderful Daily Philosophy magazine.
There should be more hesitation, more thinking-feeling, less acting out. The idea that philosophy could be daily, like brushing your teeth, is wonderful. This also means that philosophy could be mundane, in the Socratic sense. Socrates put his body at risk, on the line, next to people, alongside them in their daily activities.
Alphonso Lingis, whom Tim knows a little bit, died recently. He was just such a philosopher, often putting himself in danger for the sake of revealing something. The school of thought called phenomenology, which I love so much, practically requires it. It’s full body contact sport.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. We are so happy to have been asked to write it. We hope you like it. Let us know by reading it and support Andreas’s project, from which we all benefit. How he does it we don’t know.
There’s another kind of “brushing your teeth,” to wit, doing stuff on automatic without thinking at all. This is unfortunately very much what we do with the idea of God, even when we think we’re being smart—we might be exercising our intelligence in a rote way. Thinking gets stuck in a rut all the time.
And this is very much where a lot of what we call “religion” lives. Think only of the Lord’s Prayer, which…Tim doesn’t even remember when they learned it by heart, it was that long ago.
How many readers think of it as a kind of deal, a transactional kind of a thing? Don’t be shy. Tim did for sure. It was one reason for turning to Buddhism: that kind of stuff seemed so “yadda yadda, you do this and I’ll do that.” It certainly sounds like it. “I’ll do nice things, you do something nice for me.”
How wrong could someone be.
In particular, the whole “I’ll be good, and you keep me from bad stuff” part. This is what we focus in on here. But really, all of it is…so good. Just so so so good. We’re writing a book on it, it’s so good.
So if you haven’t already, do subscribe to Daily Philosophy. Oh, and read our piece!