The other day I found a photo of me reading Hobbes' Leviathan at the foot of Rodin's Thinker outside Philosophy Hall on the campus of Columbia University circa 1986 (the photo was used in advertisements for Columbia's Summer School in the New York Times). This brought back memories of my university studies and my unorthodox attitude toward philosophy even back then.
As I've recounted before, my first philosophical act was ceasing to believe in god when I was nine years old. I had no broader explanation for a godless universe, which is why I was primed to fall so strongly under the influence of Ayn Rand when I first read The Fountainhead at age 12. Here was a comprehensive worldview that could replace Christianity - and, being of both a passionate and an intellectual bent, I was certainly susceptible to that kind of theory. Yet much of what drew me to Rand was that her "Objectivism" was, as she put it, "a philosophy for living on earth" - something not merely theoretical but also eminently practical in the search for joy and reason and meaning in life.
When I studied philosophy more formally at Columbia - reading Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and such - I felt that something essential was missing. I had a visceral dislike for analytic philosophy of language and as I recall I got a C in symbolic logic. What I wanted were not quasi-mathematical formulations of abstract syllogisms, but insights into how to live the best life I possibly could as a human being. What I was searching for was philosophy as a way of life, but I didn't discover Pierre Hadot's resurrection of that approach until 15 years ago. In the intervening 25 years I was on my own, rummaging through Aristotle, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the like while continuing to work my way through and out of Rand. None of this was a full-time pursuit because I had decided not to pursue a Ph.D. in ancient philosophy, instead plunging into the hard realities of making a living in the business world and then stumbling onto a career in Internet technologies when I was 30.
As the years have flown by, my conception of philosophy as the passionate pursuit of wisdom has become ever clearer, but it is rooted in my early encounters with great thinkers and, even before that, in my childhood wonderings about the universe and my lifelong yearning to be a good or even extraordinary person. I'm still working at it...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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