I am glad I was able to steal some time to drive back and pay a visit to some of the important 5th and 6th century BCE philosophers now widely known as the "Pre-socratics". These pioneers are the ones who introduced a new way of inquiring into the world and the place of human beings in it. In fact, they are the ones who set the agenda for the inquiry we all find ourselves undertaking today. Though not explicitly expressed by the text, but one could deduce that they gave birth to the branches of philosophy we have today: Metaphysics, Ethics, and Epistemology. I think it is also fair to say that they also gave birth to the scientific enquiry. The significance of their contribution makes pre-Socratic reading a good starting point for anyone interested. What became even more interesting as I read was to note that these philosophers are not only "pre-scientific" as widely accepted and later noted by Plato and Aristotle, but they are pre-theological as well.
At any rate, let me focus on what I want to discuss today. Having had a grasp of the Pre-socratics, I then happened to leisurely listen to a lecture by mid-20th century British philosopher, Alan Watts. Watts, as some might already know, is well known for his interpretation and articulation of Eastern philosophy, perhaps the first or most notable western philosopher to do so. The lecture he was giving was basically an introduction to metaphysics for a group of psychology students. Watts thinks there are really four questions that philosophers have asked about existence from the beginning of recorded time. First is: Who started it? The second is: Is it real? Third: Are we going to make it? And the fourth is: Where are we going to put it? When you think these questions over, Watts says you end up with a fifth question: Is it serious? And that’s the one our generation has to try to address. It's the one I want to discuss today; Is existence serious?
Now, a man is allowed to unapologetically change his mind at any point in time, but it is my personal basic metaphysical opinion that existence and the physical universe is not serious, and there is no specific point in time at which you ought to arrive. Existence is basically playful. It's playful nature can be best understood by analogy with music, particularly jazz music. Because music, as an art form is essentially playful; that is why we say you "play" the guitar, you don’t "work" the guitar.
Music differs, say, from travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere. And of course, we, being a very compulsive and industrious species are obsessed with getting everywhere faster and faster, until we eliminate the distance between places. For example, with some of the latest modern jets you can arrive almost instantaneously. What happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place in time. So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey because the point of travel is to move from point A to point B.
In music though (with close reference to choral music), one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, then the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! Likewise, when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room and say that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.
Surprisingly, we don’t see that as something brought by our education system into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of "come on cutie now you go to pre-school", and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade. And then first grade leads to second grade, and so on, and then you get out of primary school and you go to high school. Then you’re going to go to university, and when you’re through with tertiary you go out to join the world. If you are lucky enough, soon you get a job - and just like that you’re probably selling insurance! At work you’ve got meetings, your output (work performance) quota and deadlines to meet. From childhood you were taught that you ought to be a "successful" adult. So you have to stay focused and fix your eyes on that goal because you cannot afford to make mistakes.
Whilst under employment, you wake up one day, about 40 years old, you say, My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there! But you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there’s a slight let-down because you feel there was a hoax. And of course there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax! They made you miss an important part of your dance. Look at the people who put their savings away and only live to retire. When they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent, and in the developed world, some go and rot in an old people’s community. Because you have simply cheated yourself the whole way down the line. You thought of life by analogy with a journey, which had a serious purpose at the end and the goal was to get to that end, success. But you missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
As per my basic metaphysical assumption, I have said that existence is musical in nature. That is to say that it is not serious, it is a play of all kinds of patterns. And when you think a bit about what people really want to do with their time; what do they do when they’re not being pushed around and somebody’s telling them what to do? They like to make rhythms. They listen to music, they dance, or they sing, or they do something of a rhythmic nature; playing cards, or bowling, or raising their elbows. Everybody wants to spend their time swinging. You see, were it not for the fact that I also have a will to live and as such I have to get a job to earn a living, I’d probably be dancing myself into art, religion and philosophy. Oh wait, I also think I'd make a good party planner. Okay, maybe I am not the best party planner because for over five years now, I have been trying without success to improve the plan that my Ethiopian brother Zera Yacob dismally failed to develop in order to host a successful universally acceptable party, which will at the same time be in line with the will of God. I have been tempted many times to theme the party according to Hegelian's dialectics, but if that's the case, I might have to modify the dialectics and make them more like the Socratic method. Anyways, that would be a story for another day.
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