Philosophy: Alive, Over the Rainbow

In the preface to his new book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking caused my jaw to drop: "Philosophy is dead," he declared.  He boldly, baldly  asserted that it was now "science" that was leading the way to discovery and philosophy was dead.

Well ensconced in his Anglo-American academic culture, I can certainly see how Hawking feels this way.  However, I would think that an astrophysicist would exhibit more caution, or at least modesty in making such comments.  After all, his sciences bloomed just as Lord Kelvin was pronouncing that all the problems of physics had been solved.  Except, that is, for a couple little nuisances, like Browning Motion and black box radiation.  These are the two problems that subsequently opened up to Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and then the quantum physics.  And these sciences have made Hawking's career possible.

But, that note aside, to a devotee of philosophy, the ignorance such a statement reveals is stunning.  Let me be clear:  philosophy is so far from dead, it is actively, competently, and most important, imaginatively, creatively and generatively taking up a role as momentous as that of its inaugural moments in ancient Greece -- from Thales through at least Plotinus.  At that time, philosophy inaugurated the formation of a new human mode of engagement with the world:  Reason.  Over the course of eons, Reason went from being a mythic demand for a new human way to a functioning faculty that could be comprehended, deployed and taught as a generalized, expected and standard-bearing capability.

Now, philosophy is mapping out the rudiments for a meta-capability:  the way of facultative development itself. The work that began with Hegel's noting of the procession of facultatively deployed life ways (shapes of consciousness), was developed in most explicit terms by Husserl, and then was taken up as a truly cosmic-level engagement of the human spirit by Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Blanchot, Nancy and their French brethren, this procession is now being studied as the very core of the human way.  Aided by notions of self-organization and ideas of "massively collective effects" in scientific discourses, philosophy finds itself indispensible, once again.

This new status may not be visible from the cloistered empircal/analytic caverns of some (especially Anglo-American) academic circles.  The work being done requires a suspension in acceptance of given formulations as being end states of reality;  it develops new languauge, words and grammar that pertain to states of generative cosmic life that may or may not even become "things" or "objects," and that hover on the fringes of becoming singular -- analogous to Hawking's own "event horizons" on the edges of black holes. The work of philosophy is not to make or render new objects, or prove their "existence."  Instead it is now at work in addressing the forming of the human psyche itself and framing new capabilities for encountering, enduring with and bringing forth what may or may not take a place in discourse.  It is now in a deep alliance with art (and the highest levels of theoretic mathematics as well), in plumbing that dynamics of that mode of "ownness," as Heidegger calls it, that rushes to singularization, in whatever form, and that may or may not make it through the vortex of becoming existent and standing among existents, as having its "being" come to be

This is a task worthy of philosophy.  Not justifying, analyzing or parsing the real, but probing what is wont to become real;  not demanding submission to logical gridlock, but teasing logic itself out to the most generative moments existents can endure.  Far from being dead, philosophy is instead taking its place in opposition to the dead, is taking up the task of being awake.  Its place, true enough, is at the edge of the horizon, where it may indeed fall off to obliteration;  but if this place is over the rainbow, it is what beckons.  If there is a "multiverse" it will take its place in our knowing capabilities, in our reasoning anticipations, because of where philosophy has dared to do its work.

Entrusting, Breakout Creative Style

The philosopher Heidegger proclaimed "we are only what we entrust ourselves to be." (The Essence of Truth, p. 58). 

I thought about this statement during a recent conversation with a friend and colleague in our "breakout creative"  project.  She felt that it was important to acknowledge where a person was in their lives and probe for what that present state of things offered.  I countered that it was the role of the breakout creative project to  help people to get beyond where they are now, to appeal to their aspirations, and to show them their readiness, the readiness they now embrace, for taking their next bold steps. 

The breakout creative is that kind of person who never settles into the everyday, and instead takes up on their yen and yearning for a more vital, encompassing, expansive and generative human endeavor. And our job in this project is to help people entrust themselves in order to live that way to the fullest extent they can.

I have met many such people in my professional mentoring work.  They aren't famous and they aren't all brilliant or even competent in all aspects of their lives.  Most don't write books and many have failed relationships in their pasts.  But they all exhibit one thing: an indomitable faith-for the generativity of life. They feel this so strongly that they risk success and fortune so that more people can be freed from their fears and self-limiting stories.  And they realize that to make such a risk pay off, they have to do the work of a breakout creative every day:  study in their fields, labor hard to expand their grammars and vocabularies to reach the new and touch the old, find new avenues of expression and new friends for support.

This is such hard work.  And yet breakout creatives entrust themselves with such a task.  

What is it like to entrust yourself with such a mission in life?  You have to feel in your bones that something else has to happen in the human endeavor if it is going to survive at all.  You have to feel that in some way, no matter what the outcome, something has to be ventured.  And there has to be the backbone to stand in this vision so that what you do can be seen, heard, touched, encountered.  Somehow you have to both entrust yourself with the talents, energies, interests and values you hold, and simultaneously you have to let go of yourself, laugh a bit at your own earnestness and let loose of what you want to give.

Then comes the scary part: You have to be willing to go public with these orientations.  Without going public, you aren't trusting yourself, you aren't entrusting what that life of yours is offering.  And you have to go public with what it is that your work, your heart and your sense of what generative brings you to.  Settling for old slogans, ideologies, religions, institutional glorifications won't do.  You have to take responsibility for putting something into play, into the public arena that can open up beyond what anyone has yet comprehended.  And take the consequences.

That is why for  breakout creatives their status quo states -- who they are, what their identities and affiliations have always been -- are not sufficient.  They entrust themselves, and look for others who do likewise, to what can only be enacted by living in the faith-for what is generative, what surpasses even them. And so they have to entrust themselves to being able to step into and grow into what is yet to be brought forth; and then they have to entrust to themselves the task of doing so, to bring forth what is to come, by their own hands.  

And for all those who do not consider themselves to be breakout creatives, but choose to stand with them, to learn from them, we see what we must make ourselves more awake to, and we learn how to do so. Maybe we can't learn to write poetry like Holderlin, or philosophy like Heidegger or Nancy or Deleuze;  maybe we can't paint like Picasso does or compose music the way Messiaen does.  But we can learn how to entrust ourselves to that faith-for the generative and we can learn how to entrust ourselves to a great task.  

Breakout creatives are just like you and me, except in one regard: they are never satisfied with where they are, who they are or what their identity and "selves" are.  They are not even curious about such things. They live to learn. 


The breakout creative project is dedicated to such learning:  learning to become awake to the living we are, the living all around us, and the call to entrust ourselves to bring forth the generativity that sustains it all.