Philosophy as a Way of Life

“Philosophy as a Way of Life”

 

by Ben Bussewitz

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In our life, we are presented with certain circumstances, environments, ways of understanding the meanings of life (i.e. religious beliefs, local customs, national ideologies, family stories), historical narratives, in-group belonging with underlying philosophical bases, ethical dispositions, and so on, and it is up to us to make sense of these different lenses and ways to trod forth on the path of life and see clearly.  It is up to us to take these kinds of situations and phenomena, and to come to our own convictions and worldviews, take accountability for those ways of seeing and doing, and to live life well and within these capacities, one who is a master of her own fate (a forger of her own bearing; the one navigator of the life she leads).  It is important to hone in on and take responsibility for the good way in which we understand and approach and take on experience.  Insofar as we have our own ways of seeing and being, and that is up to us and us alone, it is with the help of philosophy that we can take up good and meaningful ideas to help us navigate our bearing that brings about our best fate; it is up to us to have good, truth-laden, practical, prudent, and virtuous ways with which we understand ourselves and our world and our life and ways with which we walk forth in experience and bring in how we present ourselves and act according to, in our life that we navigate and create the path that brings us to our ultimate fates, the fates of our own creation (Matthew 7:3-5; Matthew 6:22,23).

In our life, we engage in our actions with certain intentions and ways with which we have it we would like our endeavors and plans bring about good results.  In this light, it is good to employ good ideas to how we approach these ventures and a thought-out schemata for where our actions will lead us.  This way, we have a good understanding and clarity in the how and the why.  This way, we create positive virtue and positive futures and positive constructs and positive ways of being.

Take the artist’s craft, for example.  When employing the pen, her instrument, the artist has different mentalities and possibilities to contemplate.  The artwork she seeks to put into beauty of form and beauty of content, she regards through thoughtful understanding and contemplation.  She sees her poems that she puts into the world, for one, the reader, to come across and spend some time face-to-face with, as having the potentiality to entreat and engender, 1) one to act with greater empathy, 2) to have better ethical standpoints, and 3) to see nature with a higher lens of beauty.  To me, these are the three most important, cardinal virtues of that which all great art is able to convey and accomplish and bring into fruition.

Therefore, the artist knows these three cardinal virtues she is aiming to bring about in the reader, and pens the poem in the hopes that good enaction in this molding and fold will come about.  We see here, the artist has an approach and understanding which guides and insightfully informs her experience, her experience of creating.

We come to have our own beliefs, our own philosophy and worldview, with which we live by, with which we come to all the unwinding seats of experience.  By taking ownership in what we are intending to accomplish, why we hope to garner these certain means to these certain ends, and the overall and microcosmic meanings we hope to attain, we are able to come to ideas and systems of ideas that help us navigate the world and bring our best selves to all the earth upon which we trod with kindness and virtue, mastery and love.