hybridplague

It came to me this morning when i was still half awake. It's amazing to me how many ideas seem to come to me in any mental mood but a "normal" one.

My second quarter in college i decided to be a philosophy major, and ever since i have had people asking me "what are you going to do with a philosophy degree?" and i have wanted to punch every single one of them in the face. Not because it's a bad question, but because they always said it in a way as to imply the answer could only be "nothing."

The question of "what do you do with a philosophy degree?" is more appropriately asked "what do you do with philosophy?" The answer is, what can you not do with philosophy, what has not been done by way of philosophy? This question may seem obscure (or possibly pretentious, but i promise it's not), but that is only because philosophy has been broken up and assigned odd and intimidating names like metaphysics, epistomology and axiology. But this is little more than for the purposes of organizing libraries and college departments.

True philosophy is the root of everything because philosophy is simply the act of questioning, for the purposes of understanding, for the purposes of challanging what exists and trying to push further on. Everything man-made, conceptually and materially, comes as a result of philosophy, from someone saying "I wonder why..." or "I wonder what would happen if i..."

Philosophy will never make me a lot of money, but i am content with this. As i see it, someone else will spend his entire life pursuing wealth and things, and in the end he will almost inevitably come to ask himself why he did it. I don't pursure those things, and i already know why. Who is the better off?

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
-Lugwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus