MAYDAY:

May the day come when we never hear the educators speak against philosophy, and may the day never come when they are right, when truly NO one has time left to truly THINK. It may be true that SOME people have no such time, as philosophy itself understands, but never has it been that NO one can have sufficient time. Time is itself a conceit as well as a mystery. Imperatives themselves are theoretical in origin and nature; nature itself is a set of presumptions, as well as presumption itself. Even to say that those who have time to think, be they great or small in number, do not deserve to lord their values over those who don’t is to recite philosophy, to parrot others’ thinking rather than extending it. Since thought itself has not yet reached the Ideal State which thought itself prescribed, there is no right, in fact, to simply “stop” the Life of Thought and to continue to force one’s way through Life according to those presumptions which simply HAPPEN to BE the most recent thoughts, stopping the process of thinking which had kept those thoughts alive, halting their growth so that they harden into desiccated dogma. To truly stand in wonder before the ontological questions is so profound that it is demonstrably indispensable; all genuine transformation and any hope of appreciation in the present rests in the ability to turn one’s back, even if only for some time, on the familiar problems and their all too familiar solutions, to restore one’s sense of sanity and to think philosophically. In truth, any truly active thinking and any truly active living are indistinguishable from the formal study of philosophy, so the term “philosophy” itself is simply a derogatory term for sanity. And there is ALWAYS time for that.

Dm.A.A.