|
Philosophical Observations
I can remember my first
brush with philosophy. My mother was in the kitchen - looking out of
the back window. "It's a beautiful day," she said; "why don't you go
out and play." I opened the front door, and looked back, but she
wasn't following me. Aren't you going to go out with me - I asked.
"No you'll be fine; just don't leave the yard - or cross the
street." It was the first time I went outside of the
house on my own. This was a big step – a rite of passage. Once
outside I saw my Uncle Bill's shiny new driveway, and ran to it.
While reaching down to touch the tar, Bill Beck saw me in his
peripheral vision, and yelled, "don't touch that tar! You'll get
burned.” I asked him what that means since I had never been burned.
He tried to
explain the concept, and I thought: how is it that he owns a house, pays
his bills, and understands all that, but doesn't understand that he
can never explain what it feels like to be burned; the understanding
is the experience of having been burned. In a flash of insight, the
empiricist criteria of meaning presented itself. In that moment I
became an empiricist, and realized that I was somehow different from
most people.
Yes I burned myself
deliberately to have the understanding, and ran back into the house
to show my mother. My bother Tom laughingly asked, “why do you keep
referring to Mr. Beck as Uncle Bill?” My mother explained that we
were not really related, and uncle was a term of endearment. This
triggered my first brush with aporia and skepticism. If my parents
would deliberately give me false information about who my relatives
are, what other false beliefs do I have? Tom didn't help by raising
the question of whether I was adopted.
In elementary school
learning math sparked the observation that maybe there are some
meaningful concepts that don't have an underlining experience, and
aren't justified by experience. We learned that a line has no
thickness because if it did, it would be a rectangle. “We can't see,
hear, taste, touch, smell, or even imagine mathematical lines,” Mrs. Monon told us.
After class, my friends wanted to take a different
route to my house. Nicky VanDerveer, the brother of the famous
basketball couch Tara VanDerveer, insisted that his route was faster, “you
know, as the crow flies,” he said; “the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line,” Robert Kramer said. Still clinging to my
empiricism I decided to put it to the test. Robert and Nicky went
their way; I went mine. Within three steps I realized that this
truth had a kind of justification that was 100%, and no amount of
experience could provide that. We would need to go through an
infinite amount of lines to come to the same justification.
During the summer of that
same year skepticism reemerged in a disturbing question: what if God
never created physical reality, but like any good omnipotent scientist,
created a mental illusion of physical reality to test it out on a single
individual? This was not a reasonable thing to believe; still there
was no way to be 100% certain of anything at that point – except
that I was conscious.
Studying philosophy
brought me to greater depths of aporia. Eventually doubt lead me to
a stunning moment of clarity. While walking in the Niagara Gorge, I
saw what looked like a snowflake floating toward me on a hot
summer's day. Reaching out my hand, it rested on my index finger. It
was beautiful – a tiny insect with pure white feathery down plumes,
black coals for eyes, and what looked like a black nose. It seemed to be
contemplating me as I contemplated it. In that moment I realized
that although it was tiny, size didn't apply to consciousness. If my
conscious mind was empty, and this insect's consciousness was empty, not even God could tell us apart because they would be
identical. We know from Leibniz's law of indiscernibles (Identity of
indiscernibles) that if two things are identical, they are really
one and the same thing. With that thought came a deafening silence.
The roar of the waters stopped. The feeling of the wind and the sun
on my face stopped. There was no gorge, no sky above me, and no
ground beneath me; only a blinding infinite consciousness remained:
inseparable, unchanging, eternal, and perfect -
read more.
©
2020
John Chiappone |