The Existential Value of Cross Cultural Philosophy
How taking alternative philosophical systems seriously can open up new existential horizons
I personally became interested in philosophy, because of a near obsession with the nature of truth. However, I am well aware that this is not the underlying orienting principle of most college students' lives. For this reason, I open all my introductory philosophy classes with David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, This is Water. Wallace argues that philosophy is an important existential undertaking even if we have little to no interest in the ultimate truth, or think that the realm of conceptual propositions is not the proper place to look for it. He writes, “The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.”
Wallace points out that whether we are aware of it or not, we all embody beliefs and values that determine how we make meaning out of our experience and our lives as a whole. Even if we are honestly convinced that we move from the neutral position of a philosophical agnostic, our everyday actions prove otherwise. Wallace illustrates this with a very mundane example, sitting in traffic on the commute home after a long day of work. It is such an unspoken assumption that this is a frustrating inconvenience that we must simply suffer our way through, most of us have likely never considered this agitated, impatient attitude is conditioned by an underlying orientation that we have chosen. Wallace points out that this response of frustration, only arises if there is an underlying orientation to our own pleasure, comfort, and convenience that is frustrated by the traffic. He also points out that expanding our horizons through philosophical study can reveal some alternative options. An awareness of the injustices of our social structure may help us look at this situation with a sense of compassion for our fellow commuters who may have “harder, more tedious and painful lives.” Wallace even suggests that a study of mysticism, religion, or maybe even astronomy and cosmology, will put it within our “power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”
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