Not So Vain

By John Immel

Today, we talk about Philosophy.

In the mind of many, this word is synonymous with useless ideas batted around like so many beach balls at the intellectual equivalent of Thelonious Monk concert: really abstract with endless indecipherable phrases.

The idea of philosophy has been further tarnished because the bible doesn’t speak too favorably on “vain” philosophies. So most Christians usually turn their mind off when the word comes into a conversation. The tragedy is everybody has a philosophy. Actually, better said, they have a whole basket full of philosophy but rarely do folks know they are carrying the basket, let alone what that basket contains.

So let me cut to the chase: what is this thing that nobody seems to want, yet carry around unaware? Here are some examples.

Do you recognize these comments?

“Give it over to the Universe…”

“No one can know anything for sure…”

“Jesus died for our sins…”

Some of you have even said one or all three of these comments, fully expecting to be understood. Our culture is full of such common phrases. We call comments like this conventional wisdom. In fact, these are philosophical statements: collections of ideas that have been boiled down to a slogan.

“Give it over to the Universe,” is an increasingly popular modern truism. This is also a philosophical statement, reducing into words elements of Quantum Physics with various religious assumptions.

“No one can know anything for sure,” is a philosophical statement that presupposes that there is no objective truth that can be found and established and understood by all.

“Jesus died for our sins,” is a philosophical statement that summarizes the abstractions of Original Sin and Federal Guilt, atonement and the ratification of a New Covenant.

Humans are the sum of their collective ideas. From the time we are born we are integrating the world, from concrete to abstract ideas. From the first time a baby realizes that just because mommy can’t be seen under a blanket she doesn’t cease to exist, to the integration of the thousand and one intellectual abstractions that make space flight possible. People are forever taking ideas, categorizing them, and placing them in systems for use. Without this ability, we would still be waiting for the gods to shower fire rain down so we can make meat not be bloody.

Humans are built to think; to engage the world we live in with our thinking. They way we get better at thinking (and the way we get better at living a prospering life) is in the accumulation of effective ideas. The way we decide what ideas we have, where we got them, and which ones are good or bad, and how we should use those ideas in context to other people is the study of Philosophy. Said another way, Philosophy is the art/science of evaluating our Assumptions, Presuppositions, and Filters.

So now you know…when I talk about philosophy, I am not tossing about intellectual beach balls. I am referring to evaluating the content of ideas: how we know what we know, where ideas came from, their objective value, and how those ideas impact our (human) interaction.