Aristotle said that even arguing against the practice of philosophy is philosophical. “Everyone must do philosophy,” he noted. Regarding this I hope to show how and why I disagree. Not everyone has a philosophical mind, and I certainly, absolutely, and indubitably was not born into a family known for their philosophical endeavors.
Reflect on the almost five thousand years that it was a question for philosophy to consider whether or not women should be recognized as either legal citizens or the property of their husbands. Should women be allowed the right to have their own property and enjoy the fruits of their own labors and endeavors?
I believe it wasn’t until the Married Women’s Property Acts in the 1800’s that this great philosophical quandary was beginning to get at least some rather long overdue acquiescence. Women were now considered separate legal entities because of these acts and would no longer be recognized as the property of their husbands. Imagine this as a once serious philosophical dilemma.
Not to worry, there are incredible women who would pioneer the way for abolition, women’s suffrage, and even oppose the Fifteenth Amendment which only gave black men (not black women) the right to vote. These women were incredible thinkers, and no doubt should be considered philosophers in their own right the same as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln.
History should not be a subject dominated primarily by men in the liberal arts arena. More of the opposite sex should study history that way women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony can be more than just a name that people recognize or have heard of but couldn’t tell you a lick about their significance or what they stood for. These pioneers in thinking and advocates for freedom who pursued individual rights for slaves and women were indeed philosophers of their era.
Everything that has once been considered a philosophical point of speculation has not always remained fodder for philosophy during the course of the advancement of human society. Of course women and slaves are human beings and should not be labeled as property. Of course they should be free to enjoy the fruits of their labors and endeavors. It is no longer a point of philosophical endeavoring. It never should have been so, but hindsight is always 20/20.
Because of how much the individual (through whatever reason one can shake a finger at) has been mentally softened, the mere questioning of life: right or wrong, good or bad, etc., by an individual is labeled as philosophy and the questioner as a philosopher. I wholeheartedly disagree. Aristotle said that the purpose of the philosopher is to “check the checker.” Hmmm… I like it!
One merely has to make a mental or physical observation about the world around them and they have become a “checker.” But they need to be checked. The sensations given by one’s own environment gives one their own unique physical perception according to their very own sensory organs for taste, sight, touch, hearing, and smell. This leads, of course, to mental interpretations and conclusions based on those physical sensations. When a philosopher begins to pry the questioner (environmental observer) regarding their observation(s) they are in fact checking the checker. They are inquiring into another individual’s unique perception. “How did you perceive that?” But as this alone stands the simple asking of someone “how was your day?” (or ‘how did you perceive today?’) could make anyone a philosopher by default. There should be more to this than what Aristotle has suggested. Below, let’s consider at least one prerequisite as a subcomponent of the philosophical structure.
I feel that the philosopher must have secured their own points of natural and or societal intrigue as a fact, or at least they should have established a unique school of thought to the best of their ability, like René Descartes (dualism) or Kierkegaard (existentialism) e.g., with regards to the way things should be perceived before they can be considered or qualified as a philosopher. There should be prerequisites if one is to be a checker of checkers. This allows the philosopher to ask questions and determine whether or not the answers they are receiving fall into or apply to their own well-established school of thought. In a manner of speaking, checking others should lead one back to checking themselves.
The person questioning right or wrong, good or bad, is not a philosopher. The purpose of the philosopher is to check such an individual exercising such freedoms in the first place. Anyone can make an examination or observation. Socrates and his famous quote about the unexamined life not being worth living must have thought that the philosopher lives within us all; a point that I might contend. If such is the case then even a chimpanzee can be labeled as a philosopher. For anything that lives will examine its own existence for as long as it is in a state of continual being.
If chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA with each other then why can’t chimpanzees be philosophical? I really doubt that a portion of the 1.2 percent of the DNA that humans and chimpanzees do not have in common is the philosophical chromosome. Chromosomes make proteins, not philosophers. Accordingly, if humans, bonobos, and chimpanzees can be philosophical then why not giraffes? Or earthworms? Or fish? Or mushrooms?
I don’t see how anything that is capable of examining its own existence automatically qualifies for the title of philosopher. Everything that lives makes these examinations. Surely every bonobo has examined their life to some degree before making that first giant leap from one tree to the next. The philosopher is the one who questions those making the observations about their conclusions. I would love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think a bonobo has ever been intrigued by another bonobo’s perception of their shared environment. And I certainly doubt that ever has there been a chimpanzee that questioned another chimpanzee’s perspective in order to gain personal growth.
Take mycelium, or the web-like material that grows underneath the forest floor. The fruiting body of this large single-celled organism is referred to as a mushroom. The mycelium network grows around plant and tree roots as it threads a multitude of trees and even forests together as one large living organism.
In fact, through this mycorrhizal network plants and trees share carbon dioxide, water, and other minerals and even information about drought and inundation with each other over many, many miles. A drought across one end of the forest can signal as an early warning to the other end of the forest through this mycorrhizal network. As a result, many trees may be spared the hardship by pursuing dormancy earlier as a result of this warning.
Correspondingly, smaller trees which cannot get sunlight from the bottom of the forest can only survive at first because of this mycelium network that feeds the tiny saplings. No, the underground network of mycelium cannot get to the sunlight either. Rather, as taller trees use carbon dioxide and water to create sugar that is used as fuel for growth, the mycelium network shares these sugars with the saplings to help them get their start.
As my reader can see, some mushrooms are good for forests while others have devastating effects as they take minerals and nutrients from the forest plants and trees and give nothing in return. As such, this network of fungal mycelium can kill the entirety of a specific species of tree or even an entire forest. In some cases, many species and hectares of forests die out for this reason often eluding the U.S Department of Agriculture and Forest Service’s until it is too late. The honey mushroom (Armillaria gallica) is one such example of a destructive species.
Living things are distinguished from non-living things by their ability to both communicate with and move throughout their environment in search of sustenance and in response to external pressures from their environment. I hope I have adequately demonstrated this. Rocks can do neither, for example. But a mushroom, having taking all that it can from a particular area in which its underground mycelium network may cover, will die if it takes all there is to take and does not move on quickly to a more bountiful area of the forest. It will literally grow toward another part of the forest that contains more readily available nutrients and life sustaining elements that it will need in order to continue its existence. To be clear, mushrooms are not stationary. They do move about their environment just like a leopard on the hunt. Indeed, it is extremely incredible.
Therefore, returning to philosophy, even the mushroom will examine the pros and cons of staying on in an environment no longer suitable for its habitation. It will, through an examination of its own existence and from the external pressures placed upon it by the environment, take action accordingly. Often, as most living creatures do, it will decide after said examination that the struggle for continued existence is worth it and it will move on to a more habitable zone. In fact, all living things go through this same process. But I would hesitate to say that because a mushroom can examine the pros and cons of extended holiday in a particular environment, after having run a cost-benefit analysis of the situation and deciding to act accordingly with regards to its best interest, should be called a philosopher!
When there is table talk (or maybe idle chatter at a book club) and I am asked my thoughts on a specific matter I always feel as if though I am being asked where it is that I feel comfortable drawing the lines in the sand. Should a civilized democratic republic allow for abortion? How many abortions can an individual have? What are the limits to why abortion should be allowed, if any? Rape? Incest? Poverty (birth control)? When is life determined and should that be a factor? Should it be ok to abort while it is at the unicellular level but not the multicellular level?
What about countries that lack access to technologies that can determine life sooner than a “doctor” who just places their hand on a woman’s stomach? Then it is up to the individual doctor doing the hand-placing, is it not? I would have to assume that some doctors of these myriad hand-placing techniques are better at it than others. I often find that when I am asked a question such as this I feel that the question is inadequate. Usually, to me, it is just a matter of the question being too far-reaching. “Do you believe in abortion?”
Well, there is proof that it exist. I have seen with my own eyes women holding baby dolls outside the clinic in Jackson, Mississippi protesting abortion. I have never actually seen an abortion first hand but, again, I have to assume people don’t protest things that don’t exist (I must say at this point within reason). I have also met a few people who have had an abortion so, yes, I believe in abortion.
I try to strengthen their own line of questioning with a question of my own which usually draws a lot of attention. It becomes obvious they have prompted a philosopher, so to speak, and now they must pay the price. But if I am going to answer a question I want to make sure it is the correct question that I am placing my name on.
My questions are not typically as terse as I often wish they could be. I am afraid however that when one has as much knowledge as I do, mainly from my many personal relationships with teachers and instructors, classmates, and the voluminous number of deep-thinking authors I have read, that one’s own angle can become quite unique and rather precise.
When asked about abortion I once replied that, “basically, you want to know where I draw the line in the sand. But my question to you first, before I can give a pithy answer and be on my way, is who gave you, a poorly evolved primate caught in the middle of an evolutionary trajectory, permission to start drawing lines in the sand in the first place? Who is it that is handing out such permission? I wish to speak to them directly because if they are giving inadequately evolved defunct human beings permission to draw lines in the sand I am confident that I can get them to give me my own special corpus of permissions as well.” I will usually follow it up by mentioning the only three options they have as far as who or what it was that must have given them permission as being: 1) another poorly evolved primate such as themselves 2) an alien from outer space, or 3) themselves. All of which come with their own inherent complications.
The reason I use poorly evolved primate is that even the silverback gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo are better adapted for their environment than we are for our own spaces in which we live. It is us, homo sapiens sapiens, who depend on so many technologies and advancements in science and medicine to get us through our day-to-day living. We need sources of heat in the winter because we live in locations that without heat we would surely perish or fail to inhabit altogether. We need medication to help us sleep through the noise of the city at night and coffee and medication to get us up and going again in the morning. There is also the need to leave one climate-controlled environment (home) get into another climate-controlled environment (vehicle) and drive yet to another climate-controlled environment (work) in order to make money that helps keep one’s environment at a certain habitable temperature. Basically, we work and dedicate a certain percentage of our lives to keeping our environments climate-controlled at the expense of the planet.
I think it can be easily argued that the bonobo and perhaps even the mushroom, both of which need nothing in the way of technical climate controlling apparatuses such as heaters and air conditioners, are more suitably adapted for this planet than we as humans are. In fact, the bonobo is a better candidate suited for philosophy than I myself could ever wish to be. Furthermore, let it be known that I feel comfortable enough with who I am today deferring any additional questions pertaining to philosophy to the bonobo. I yield the floor at this time.
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