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From Jeff Vander Clute, Director of Information Services:

Perhaps you read Nick Branstator's letter on why Tripod is a great philosophy graduate program. Well, it's true. As Branstator suggests, a wonderful atmosphere of discussion and debate exists at Tripod . We participate daily in this "philosophical project," and by challenging ourselves to walk the "tightrope between vision and reality" we have established, in our lives and on the Web site, a spirit of creatively doing right for ourselves and for our community. Now, it happens that I am quite interested in the underlying sensibility of Tripod, and it would be uncharacteristic for me not to share a few non-thoughts on an ethos that I like to think underlies this company, or at least underlies me, and hence (perhaps) my contributions to the Tripod community. So here goes...

Most of us shun philosophy, even here at Tripod, all the while living amidst conflicting ideologies whose origins we do not understand. Each of us is complicit in propagating this world of personal and social unrest, and it takes courage to recognize the terrifying importance of our lives. Certainly, confronting one's existence is a difficult endeavor, but it is, as some say, the unexamined life that is not worth the effort. And to the extent that we examine our world and our shared place in it, we are doing philosophy.

Alright, so I believe that we owe it to ourselves to think long and hard about our lives. Unfortunately, a notion of Philosophy (with a capital P) discourages many of us from healthy introspection. This notion is based on, and compounded by, many of the treatises, manifestos, and other Philosophical tomes, written in inaccessible prose, that one encounters in "higher" education. Equally disturbing to me is a suspicion that the shining stars of western civilization who have publicly addressed life's difficult questions, and who, in many cases, have contributed to the making of Philosophy, have constructed enormous towers of thought in order to avoid personally confronting their own contradictions. To my thinking, Philosophy probably deserves its bad reputation.

But we can do better for ourselves. The problems we face follow largely from our dogmatic beliefs about, say, what is good and what is true; beliefs that we have inherited via our Philosophical tradition. I venture that such prefabricated answers are training wheels, in and of themselves they count for virtually nothing. It matters only that we continually ask these questions of ourselves; not of some marvelous, and usually dead, thinker.

Unfortunately, some of us expend vast amounts of energy spinning our wheels on others' slippery conceptions of Goodness and Truth when 1) the historical contexts in which such ideas are embedded no longer exist and 2) the founding assumptions have long been forgotten or taken on faith. The important points are usually buried, and few people have the stamina to keep up with so much, er, poppycock.

Thus, much of our Philosophical tradition may strike us as vapid, and yet its influence on us is inescapable. Many of us can't engage in healthy introspection, discussion, or debate. How can we without a starting point that is concrete enough to be meaningful? So, frighteningly, many of us conclude that minorities are dangerous, that homosexuals are morally perverse, that we are better than our neighbors, that we are undeniably Correct, et cetera. Of course such beliefs are absurd, but are they rare?

Happily, there is cause for optimism. We can overcome the petty grievances that make life miserable. In fact, the seeds for banishing our more ridiculous attitudes are at least present in many of the Philosophical movements and in the major religions that comprise our intellectual and spiritual heritage. And they are a great deal simpler than the towers of thought and belief that have been raised around them. As I see it, the important ideas are as simple as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Yes, the golden rule is a sound bite! But it is a philosophy with teeth (and a little p), and it is a most powerful heuristic for living a good and happy life. Is there anything in, say, the Ten Commandments that doesn't follow from it?

Despite the atrocities that are constantly in the news, I think these ideas are slowly catching on. Increasingly, we are shunning the arguments of authority that have propped up one exploitative and cruel regime after another; arguments predicated upon a "vertical" transcendence through race, country, and God. Moreover, I see gradual movement toward a personal answerability, wherein we, as individuals, are more willing to examine our world and our shared place in it. The result is that we are opting increasingly for the "horizontal" transcendence that occurs when we place ourselves in the shoes of others and act accordingly. This, quite simply, is the golden rule in action. This is a philosophy worth living!

Of course, we have a lot of work left to do.

Cheers,

Jeff, Director of Information Services (1/24/97)

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