As I have continued to read Spinoza's Ethics and at the same time apply Walter Kaufmann's suggestion to rethink every step critically, for a few days there I started to take notes toward a geometrical presentation of propositions I could agree with (e.g., instead beginning with a self-caused God who created the universe, my propositions began on more Aristotelian lines with being itself and an eternal universe).
Even though this might have been a worthwhile exercise (and I might revisit it sometime), doubts crept in. Is the fundamental nature of the universe really the right place to start in constructing a philosophy of life? Channeling thinkers as diverse as Socrates, Lao Tzu, Lin Yutang, Pierre Hadot, and Robert Sokolowski, I had a flash of insight: the ground truth to build from is not the universe as a whole but the "humanverse" in which we find ourselves. By this I mean specifically that you and I are both human beings who possess λόγος and therefore can engage in a conversation about truth, beauty, meaning, and how to live.
This conversation is not only philosophical: as I sketched out in my manifesto on philokalia earlier this year, it is also musical, poetical, artistic, and aesthetic in the widest sense of the word. (Or, to put it another way, philosophy is not only linguistic, dialectical, and theoretical.)
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates worried about the impact of the written word on human interaction because you can't have a conversation with a book. Machiavelli and Nietzsche (among others) might have disagreed, because in their own minds and in their practice of writing they carried on a kind of conversation with ancient friends such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Plutarch.
Naturally, ancient friends are no substitute for living friends, which is why philosophy, music, poetry, arts, sciences, crafts, and so many other pursuits are best done in collaboration and communication with people who can help you learn, grow, and flourish.
As to the propositions and commitments that flow from the ground truth of shared humanity, shared thought, and shared speech, I'll need to ponder that further and post again...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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