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Good Morning Friends
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today is Saturday July 18, 2009
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I just wanted to get some thoughts down on paper while they are still fresh in my mind. I suppose it is the same thing as remembering a good dream; you don't want to leave anything out, especially the good parts or the essential message. Anyway, I was just thinking about philosophy and how we all express ourselves. And, expressing ourselves is just another way of revealing our philosophies anyway.
And, then the idea struck me that that is exactly the same thing that a painter is doing when he is painting a picture. I mean, just think about it. He is going to create a subjective piece of work, and essentially, what he is going to end up with are the thoughts of his mind on paper or canvass. He is going to need some raw data just like the philosopher is going to need. And, what are the philosophers inputs to this final product you might logically enquire? Well, the philosopher can only construct something about which he knows, or thinks he knows. Things like the nature of reality and knowledge and even making comments about objects and time and space and change. These are the main concerns of the philosophers and they will be the raw data and the inputs that will emerge as his philosophy. A philosopher can do no more than make comments about things which he can see and feel, things that we may call his objective realities. But, the philosopher being a man possessed of a brain also has as one of his tools that vast array of things that emerge from his imagination, namely ideas. So, a philosopher, then, is involved in the business of essentially of trying to derive meaning about the things that he knows; he wants to know what these things are in the first instance and what they mean to man.
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And, so it is with the painter. Every painter is a philosopher of course, and he is just expressing himself in a different form that is all. He has ideas about life and sex and beauty, and in fact, all of the things that philosophers might care to think about. He will be getting his message across in images to us whereas the philosophers that most of us know about will be doing their business with words. But, what they are both trying to accomplish of course is to provide us with their individual meaning of things. So, a philosopher and a painter in this sense are truly one and the same kind of person involved in the same kind of business. So, the next time you examine a painting by some famous person, or even your own painting for that matter, rest assured that contained within that work is also a work of philosophy.
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Actually, the above thoughts are the product of my mind after watching a video about two men engaged in a conversation. And, that is when I started thinking about the dialectic. And, the dialectic is used quite a bit by philosophers to gain meaning, understanding, and even truth itself. The dialectic accomplishes these things by looking at something from different angles. And, a good healthy debate will bring out competing themes in an argument. So, just as the painter uses his brush to show us some difference, once again, it is the philosopher who uses words to show us what he is trying to express. Now, fortunately for me, and maybe that is why I am dwelling on this topic in this manner, is because the video that I am talking about is related to the problems that we are all facing in the financial world. So, watch this video below and see if you can appreciate what I mean about my ideas about the dialectic. How would a painter describe the current financial mess I wonder?
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Isn't that a great video? I mean, just examine the content. They are talking about finance and what is happening to our economy simply because it is not regulated properly. We are at the mercy of those with greater power than ourselves. And, we got that way because there is no proper representation in the States. And, you wonder I boil over when I start reading and thinking about U.S. politics? Well, Max Kaiser did the heavy lifting for us in this debate; he helped us to see the conflicts that we must live with.
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Anyway, I just want to leave you with my You Tube video that I took after work last night.
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And, don't forget: Racing today at the Meadowlands. Post time is 16:00 hrs. B.C time. 15:00 hrs. Alaska time.
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