“Free Your Mind” Part 1
Why Philosophy is Important?
“The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, that without end.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.”
— Margaret Fuller
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” — Henry David Thoreau
There is a wonderful scene in the movie “The Matrix” when Morpheus, a teacher of secrets, is taking Neo out for one of his first training programs after being painfully liberated from the illusion of the Matrix. They have entered the “Jump program” and find themselves standing on top of a high rise building. Morpheus turns to Neo and poses this challenge, “Free your mind”, and then proceeds to leap impossibly several hundred yards to the nearest building suggesting Neo follow behind. Neo’s response….”Whoa.”
Philosophy rightly understood is about freeing the mind. It is about the “clarification of ideas and the removal of muddles.” Before we can grasp how we can free the mind it is imperative to first understand how the mind is manacled in the first place. We are, all too often, strangely unaware of what ideas are coloring our perceptions. Like a set of colored glasses our perceptions are all tinged with blue or red or green depending upon the lens. These ideas we hold to be true are often adopted without inspection or evaluation. What religion we come from, what society has nurtured us, what core life assumptions came from our education , what values our family has imparted all form a kind of lens through which we view the world, life and ourselves. Our inability and often unwillingness to break away from these established lens’s, even momentarily for evaluation sake, form a kind of prison cell of perception. Like Neo in the story “The Matrix”, we have an unsettling feeling that there is a larger perspective, a broader view, a more comprehensive understanding that evades our current range of perception.
These traps are easy to recognize in the political dialog of today. People gravitate to one camp or another and view all events, all debates, and all positions from the standpoint of whether or not it furthers the cause of their camp. To approach a social problem from outside of the camp, to look at it independently is extremely difficult. Religious and cultural biases are equally easy to recognize in contemporary society.
The ideas we hold, the values we accept, the perspective we assume all have a direct bearing upon the choices we make throughout a lifetime. If this be true then is it not advisable to take a moment and examine them? If we are honest with ourselves most of the ideas we accept are inherited and not thought through or even chosen. This is true for little things like what our personal likes and dislikes, favorites and not-favorites.
Many ideas passed on to us through our culture simply live on in our minds unchallenged. For example there was a time in Europe not that very long ago when the idea of the earth being flat was the common belief.. It went unquestioned for centuries. Similarly modern western culture assumes we only live once. Few doubt it. For a great deal of recorded history slavery was deemed acceptable. Many cultures consider women inferior. Some religions view dark skin as a disapproving sign of God. These assumptions and positions go unquestioned in many circles.
Philosophy is intended to be an adventure of the mind. An invitation to step outside of the prison cell of our current consciousness and explore new fields, new dimensions, new perspectives. Those who remain inside the prison cell, no matter how large, are in the words of Beckett in his Murder in Cathedral “living and partly living”. Thoreau considered a life devoid of such exploration a life of “quiet desperation”. And Emerson’s quote that precedes this article is testimony to the ever evolving circle imperative.
So this is the bondage about which the great philosophers , particularly of classical times, addressed themselves. This central human predicament is relevant to the circumstances and choices of every single human being who has ever stepped upon the face of this earth. The concept of philosophy was conceived to remedy and address this fundamental human conundrum. To live a good life one must begin to think and raise questions, these great souls would say. To ignore the big questions of life is to opt out of the fundamental human adventure.