The Descent Into Primeval Chaos

As readers of this blog (and its sibloglings) will no doubt appreciate, there is no direct route to becoming an American faylasuf: all maps are useless, the GPS has gone dead. "When you are philosophizing," Wittgenstein remarked to himself in 1948, "you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there."

One lives the life that unfolds according to the hands that are dealt and, at some point, discovers that the game is just that, a game, but that the cards are fascinating objects in themselves. Then one looks up and, glancing around the table, takes mental notes on the relations between the players: their jokes and asides, their rapid calculations as each round plays itself out, their regard or disregard for their competitors--the scent of human sympathy or contempt--and concludes that, after all, it is this that really matters.

And then the old cliche about winning and losing being less important than one's conduct during the game returns to the mind as a kind of fierce and unforgiving wisdom.

At that moment the cards, the players, the green felt table-cloth, the beer bottles and ash-trays, the snide remarks, the entire scene is revealed to the last detail as one extended symphony of cliches. And you are playing your part, inescapably. And when the dealer shuffles and glances in your direction you say, automatically, "I'm in," because you know, whether or not you play this round, you are still "in" so long as you can take a breath.

You are "in the soup," as they say: the soup of death but also recrudescence. Both death and recrudescence stain your shirt as you rise from the table, and those stains announce to the world your complicity in all that has transpired through the long night of gaming.

When your head clears, you return to your books and writing desk to see what sense you can make of it all. That's really what differentiates you from the other players in the game: you happen to be in touch with the long history of human self-reflection. The community in which you live places a modest value upon that history and dedicates some of its surplus to supporting those of its members (like yourself) who are willing and able to make and preserve a record. Why the community does this is unclear, but perhaps it is because making a record is just another way of keeping score. In any case, this is your niche, which you will occupy until you are no longer able to hold on--at which point it will pass to another.

And so it goes. Falsafa is like running a tab. It is "keeping tabs" on oneself and the found world. Nothing more. Nothing less.