Philosophers Deli

When my sons were very young, I would sometimes ask them what they’d like to be in life. For a MacGuffin, I’d mention that when I was young, I thought for a long time about this very question, and then wrote down my conclusion on a sheet of paper, which I had put in a special blue envelope someplace in the attic. But I had forgotten where. Would they help me find it? I needed it now because I had some free time coming up and I wanted to do some of what was written on the paper. Then we would talk as we searched. On one of these occasions, one of my sons talked about a story he had heard on the news, of someone famous whose garbage was searched in an attempt to find out more about him. What, my son asked, do you call the person doing the searching?

I wondered if he was getting suspicious.

As we leisurely looked at old boxes of books and papers, I told him that such a person was a garbologist, and went to school to study garbology, to learn how to do this, before actually setting out to explore people’s trash. He said then, that he no longer wanted to be an Elvis impersonator when he grew up. He wanted to be a garbologist.

I have only recently learned from a wikipedia article that the terms garbology and garbologist exist, and have been around for some time, and that garbology is an academic major dealing with modern refuse. This amused me. And with too much time on my hands now this led me to wonder again at the nature of man. About how ideas occur independently in separate places but around the same time, and are pursued in somewhat different ways. Commonly cited examples include the development of calculus, the development of writing, the invention of the telephone, and who knows what else. I wondered to what extent these events are independent, and whether your concept of independence is the same as mine or the next person’s. Perhaps there’s some shared sense that the time is right for a logical next step in a process whose end we cannot see, because it is defined by the process, by us, always changing and receding faster than we can pursue it, entropy itself generating entropy, and order circling in upon itself until it vanishes into the next dimension which, when it gets enough order, will have its own big bang. The logic is our invention too, you know. The way we knew a process was logical was that we made up the logic as we went along, then went where the logic pointed. The tangent was always a straight line, but our direction never was. The horrors of the twentieth century prevent me from calling this process progress.

Most of the items on my “to do” list will never be done, of course. When my life ends, not soon I hope, I will not have learned Aramaic or Coptic. I will not have read more than a small fraction of nineteenth century philosophy. I will have known but a vanishingly small fraction of those of my time. And yet it is nearly enough for my scope. When our activities are focused around what we love, we use our time wisely.

I still haven’t adopted a fixed perspective on cultural relativism and its problems, or logical positivism and falsification, because I don’t know enough about language and its influence on our concepts to feel any confidence in an evaluative process. I feel fixed in time, and that time is passing. I think I can appreciate it for what it was. Yes, there was a feeling of intellectual excitement: we can finally get it right, clarify our terms, end the madness. And to have felt some of it during Friday night pizza and espresso and Chinatown and pastrami on rye fueled discussions, optimism a buzz lasting the weekend until Sunday midnight when the libraries closed without an answer, and still digesting until Wednesday, when you knew that this Friday you had to raise the case of …. It was fun.

Then graduate studies come to an uneven bumpy end. Fred decided on law school in Alabama. Susan was law school in New York. Connie, already wealthy, began to travel. Me on Wall Street. Family. Move to someplace nice where the boys can hike and swim. Thank you Fred and Susan and Connie and the rest of you, wherever you may be. It was fun. Maybe now I can get some sleep.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Cultural anthropology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.