Philosophy
Philosophy. It shouldn't be a dirty word spoken only in private or in a low voice if caught having to say it in public. A philosophy is something each of us has and something each of us does. It's our personal outlook on the world that governs the choices we make.
But philosophy is not a word that rolls easily off the tongue.
For good reasons.
Philosophy has become the exclusive playground of universities and pedigreed professionals. The subject has become an external thing, something to be examined only in the dry, thin atmosphere of textbooks and journals. The flesh has been stripped and the bones locked in the dungeons of the Ivory Tower where they are seen and worshiped only by a small sect of academic high priests.
Pilgrims to the Shrine of Academic Philosophy are told that while the philosophical relics of eternal truth lie deep within the dungeons below, they must be locked away and closely guarded to protect the uninitiated from the dangerous, blinding power these bones posses. Suffer, like good pilgrims, through the sermons from priest to pilgrims called Philosophy 101, and glimpses of the glory of philosophy will be revealed as promised in the syllabus.
Those of us lucky enough to have been warned about the pain and suffering inflicted by these sermons, and the negative impact they could have upon our grade point average, avoided the pilgrimage.
But we remained curious about the Mysteries.
Who hasn't found himself on the top floor of a B. Dalton's strangely drawn to the dark aisle in the corner marked Philosophy? The words of the priests smile down upon us. We pick a book at random, open it to the middle, and are immediately blinded by sentences so deep and heavy we run and take refuge in the comforting pages of People magazine.
But there have been renegade priests. Priests who firmly believed that a philosophy that couldn't be clearly explained to the man on the street was not worthy of veneration. Renegades who believed that philosophy is something common to all men, something that influences, if not governs, all the choices made in ordinary life. One renegade priest went so far as to say that a landlord seeking a tenant should ask an applicant about his philosophy of life instead of his place of employment, since it would be the prospective tenant's attitude toward ethics that really decided whether or not he would pay the rent on time.
We can't avoid making choices. Every moment of our lives we are faced with an infinite number of alternate ways we could spend that moment. Even doing "nothing" is the result of choice.
What governs the choices we make?
Our outlook on life.
We rely on our sense of order and value to sift through the chaos of choice and choose what to do and what to avoid. We choose to do and not do based upon what we think is important and what is not. We are all philosophers with an individual world view. We live our philosophy. Our philosophy changes and evolves as we learn more and more about the world, both inside and out.
We may not like the word, but the lives we live are philosophy's flesh and blood. It is an essential part of what we are. Philosophy is unavoidable.