Intense, Passionate, and Obsessive

Intense, Passionate, and Obsessive

Samuel Bird

Philosophy is about asking questions. There are lots of different types of questions a person might have. Some of those questions involve the material, living, or chemical. Physics, biology, and chemistry can respond to those. Some questions don’t have a good method of study to ask them. Those things are left to philosophy. Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Philosophy is also the science of concepts. The tool used is logic. There are different categories in philosophy. Logic can be used to look at each. Metaphysics asks about reality. Epistemology is about what is true and why. Ethics is the question of how to be moral. People have a lot of questions about what makes a good life. Philosophy has many answers around it. Philosophy has changed my life. 

Stop, just stop. Take a moment. Step from this page to be with yourself for a moment. What wisdom does the body feel? What wisdom does the mind think? What wisdom does the soul value? What did the previous paragraph do for you? What did it seem or mean to you? It relayed information, and it wasn’t terribly untrue, yet it still likely feels like it failed you. Did that paragraph violently wrap its grip around your soul and squeeze until you sought reprieve, only to find in its compression it was finally the resolve to the vacuum you have felt? Did it divinely resurrect some part of your soul alive in some way you have become dead to? Did your mind and heart meet in near rebellion of your will, only for your reason to tender bridling both? The words amounted to no lie, but the writer couldn’t have been more dishonest. When I wrote this, I withheld the raw and whole half of my being. I said this, largely as I find the world, but I did not say it as I am. I withheld myself from this. Why would one do so? Perhaps a lack of courage or not knowing what one is presenting. No matter how epistemically defensible this piece was, I hate it, and perhaps you do too. I hate it because of the impartiality it approaches existence. Being in the world as what we are is brimming with affinity for this and that, as long as we are engaged. How can one talk about those facts before facts, the truth before all truth, and the good before all good, without having the soul erupt from themselves, take control of the pen, and passionately dictate? How can one address the question of being, that is before all other facts and lives, and treat it as a cold and dead fact? Nothing of the purporting reaches the audience, no matter how logically consistent it may be. I appreciate you reading this terrible paragraph. Past trust earned pushed you through that wretched slog of writing. However, I hope next time you will be more open to giving up on me if I am not doing something for your soul. No! This method of philosophy cannot stand! We have too much of treating the whole attack on being as something hardly worth the questioning. Dusty books and geriatric scholars are left alone to do that which keeps us from joining the waking world from the dreaming one. May I be blunt? We do not have time! We are dying. At all times my flesh drips off the bone and I take one more step in my wanderings to the grave. What am I going to do? What will this all have been? What on earth, heaven, or hell was this thing I was that did all that wandering? In the meantime of my momentary launch from cradle to grave, souls around me that attach themselves intimately to mine find themselves doing the same. I am at all times insufficient for the perception of what I perceive. They are all perceived by such a small instance. This doesn’t even lightly or partially ask the question of what this would, could, or should all then mean. No matter what I suppose, I am left to die knowing any answers could be robbed from me at the grave and any guess could be otherwise. What fool or ignoramus could possibly look at the plight of the beings and treat it not with contempt or turn away, but somehow worse, to treat it as naught? The once mighty philosophy which was the transcendent thoughts of a mitigated man, reaching up into the infinite to give him something to fight back. Now, philosophy has become a mathematics of words. How could someone be trained to look so deeply into the thought, and treat it as nothing but a means to win arguments and show their intellect? This is the participation of the mind with its world! This is life! This is engagement! Passion is a non-negotiable for that medium that is all to that thing that is passionate. Passion is the true willing of what we will. We can get caught in complex motivations until we dryly execute a labor to survive because somewhere down the line and many years ago, there was something worth staying alive for. Passion is the immediacy of executing on what one wills before it gets caught up in trails that eventually are at odds with itself. It is not the simple action of doing what one will in the world, but becoming the thing that brings that thing about in the world. When one does this, they really mean what they do. When one really means what they do, I suppose they have the best chance of having meant anything at all. For love, we do this silly thing and that foolish thing. It is in the end a deal worth its transaction because it was not the reasonability we were after, but the love. Our passion is the living out of our deepest and highest will, such that to all others we look the fool. This is why I could never write for a teacher. They asked me to carve soul into idea, then word, then put those words in the world. Teacher, you have not earned the right to ask this of me. You have found no subject for it to be worth it from me. For that which fosters my feverish fervor, I will work until my sight becomes dim and my head throbs. I will not blindly and lifelessly do those actions for something so divine. For this reason, I think my slight education has been to my benefit. I have not had thinking become dead labor but living and vibrant change. I haven’t been taught to resent thought as the means to resources solely. Thoughts are my love. With this real love, it meets in my heart how I find myself thinking about you. I now have the motivation to share a message, and the message now has the means to reach you. Can a man hear a list of premises and have his soul touched? What multiple methods of communication are needed for this effort we undertake? Philosophy is the action of Esse Maxim. We go to Philosophy’s feet to ask of her, let us ask why we came to her. The motivation for our asking is half the answer, and it may well be the only answer we get. How do I become the best man I can, oh, Philosophy? Perhaps a thought comes in response, but I learn in my action what matters most and am left with what initiated the asking. We look at self and world, but below that we have our value we seek manifest in them. Why do we ask? Why do we answer? Why do we allow our existence? Any outcome of a fact starts as a reason for knowing. To us, below all things is will. How then can we be impartial in our asking when it is partiality that motivated the question? Perhaps we choose to set our will to the side for a moment to see the facts with clarity. This can have its wisdom, but we only set down our will for its proceeding reassumption. We do that which we do in the world, because we want the world to be so and our experience to be so. The world can tell us what values it offers to our wills, but we mustn’t let it tell us we can’t will or have us valuing things opposing that will at our core. Let our pretension be lowered for the wisdom of nature’s gifted idiocy. When a mate is found, the mind grows weak as the instinct grows able. If the objective was to think the most things about the world the most accurately, then this fails. However, these passions move us past the powerful reason we have against limited facts. In fact, below every thought out argument is our motivation for sharing it. We can, in our sophistry and constructivism, come to a host of conclusions. What thoughts happen before the speaking that makes us want to say what we do? Hume spoke well of the thoughts as passions. We are not objective beings because we address being with our objectives. You can hate it, but you must find it so. We are then left to use the core of wisdom to identify these ends we have, manage them, and bring them about. I have my list of objectives. I must, because I am writing this now. My value in this is you. I want to make room for your soul, prepare you for death, and engage you with your existence. You have, in my eyes, deserved a mind to labor on your behalf and not for its scholarly prestige. At first, my love for you started as a passion that came from the core of my will. As I have meditated on it, it has become a part of my philosophy. I write not because my ideas are “true” or “good,” but because this is me exemplifying engaging with my existence and me doing so on your accord. "This is true!" In the sense that it seems to be in the world, perhaps. but it is not in the mind in totality. By the living out of this passion, I am being what I am. No cowardly escape is made from what fate has produced and I have willed to be. By this passion, I am pitted with labor against the world, but I am harmonious with my own ontology. Logic is my means, but it is only so in as far as it works for you. I will not let this medium call me from my ends. If we abandon ourselves for the truth, we will find we could never have it, and we now don’t have ourselves. My core will is my Esse Maxim. From that, I have an adoption on your behalf for yours. What do you will it to be, and what is your will and what you want it to be? Let the furthest horizon make it the highest ideal to shoot for. In my writing this you hear my passion which is the manifestation of my will as philosophy. Our will is ever present to us. There is no impartial law, for every law has a valuing. How can the laws of nature, if any, be any different? Here, let me ask a question I have had for a while: If something is so by degree, does that make it arbitrary to demarcate? In this I think of anything that is a gradient. Why have I not mentioned this thought before? What on earth or hell did reading that idea do for you? If I find it as an idea I can share to aid you in your aims, then I will elaborate. Until then, let the idea fester and rot in my skull. Let me now speak clearly to you. Philosophy can’t be the means to obfuscate in order to  obviate you from your life! It is that which engages you to it. Don’t dig into the contingency of morality to find the hedonistic permissiveness you salivated at. Philosophy as passionate wisdom would ask if that hedonism is our true end. Alternatively, late modern philosophy would dig into the non-necessity, declare non-possibility, and then do whatever they felt like doing. Our life can’t be obviated or our will delegated without a deep betrayal to our selfhood. Philosophy is sweat on the brow, the throbbing of the temples, the swelling of the chest as the being seeks to comprehend. This is all the facets of our entity joining in wondering. Every new implication is an imperative as man sees no fact without an ought. I think of what an outsider thinks a philosopher is, perhaps a chiseled soul basked in wisdom and laboring with thought against those questions that keep the mind racing late into the night. With peace, clarity, and maturity they approach the mystery of being with all its horrors and divinity. They care for the minds and souls and the thoughts of weary travelers. Is there wisdom in what the layman hopes the philosopher to be? Did the philosopher embark with those late night questions and find himself arguing over the rules of a disjunct? All philosophers are fools, but some know why they philosophize. I want to be this sagely wise one who guides you on your way, not an academic. My rage at these thinkers turns to grace. They need this reminder of why we do this, and from that more deeply grasp what it is that we do. If a philosopher can’t soothe the existentially dreaded soul, he is not. Which way will we go? Is philosophy another avenue for demonstrating all we know, or the admission and activity of how little we do? What is all this about? What does it mean? If we get it wrong, what is then of us? There is so much we need to believe and so little we can know. Perhaps you can converse and say I am wrong here or even contradictory, but within you is the instance of these thoughts. You know how little existence makes sense. You know how much it seems to ask of you and not tell you what to do with it. You know the desperation. You know the anxiety. You know the contingency. You know the inevitability. Finally, you know the finality. In the moments your mental walls are lowered, you look out over the horizon and find it so sheer and absolutely more than your graspability. You are left to fathom phantoms. Whatever caused all this, thrust us against the world as we cry for reprieve in the form of answers. Wanting ears turn silent gusts into quiet voices that carry answers we don’t really have. You will notice there is even less structure to this chapter than most of mine. This is because what I needed to say was more than what I could. I wish you could join me in my mind and view the seemingness I held as I wrote this. My whole existence is so alien to me and yet all I have. All I have is some things to wonder at, and the feverish, sleepless, intense, obsessive, passionate will to make me wonder with all I have. All I have is the want to give you what I don’t have. No man has the answer, but some care enough to hand you the best they could fabricate. For you my friend, I would find the best of things to offer. I pray I can always provide the larger and messier paragraph with its passion, over the structured small one that was no vessel for my soul.